


Shadows of Stars

by squirenonny



Series: Voltron: Duality [11]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Additional Warnings in Chapter Notes, Autistic Keith (Voltron), Autistic Pidge | Katie Holt, F/F, F/M, Full series AU, Hunk (Voltron) Has Anxiety, Hunk (Voltron) Has Two Moms, Lance (Voltron) Has ADHD, M/M, Matt Holt has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Not Season 3 Compliant, Not anything compliant really, Shiro (Voltron) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-01-07 10:47:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 42
Words: 482,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12231306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: The paladins have dealt a major blow to Zarkon's empire. Reunited with their families and stronger than ever, they're ready to launch a counter-offensive. But to do so, they need more allies. Allies like the fabled New Altea and their spy ring, the Accords.But Zarkon isn't about to sit idly by as his enemies gather their strength. He means to put an end to the Voltron Coalition once and for all--and this war is about to get personal.[Season 3 of Voltron: Duality] [Updates Every Other Monday]





	1. An Uneasy Peace

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, all, and welcome to season 3 of Voltron: Duality! If you're new to this series, you're definitely going to want to start at the beginning, with _[Another Word for Never](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7638178/chapters/17390476)_. That and _Someplace Like Home_ are vital to understand the plot of this story; the others provide emotional context, backstory (especially for the OCs) and otherwise enhance the overall experience, but are not strictly necessary to follow the plot.
> 
> If you've read up to this point, you can probably guess this, but Voltron: Duality is entirely non-canon, especially in the wake of season 3. Don't assume anything from the show canon past season 1 holds true here, especially where the previous paladins and the origins of Voltron are concerned.
> 
> See end of chapter for a note on the Major Character Death warning on this fic.

Lance woke to the sound of rain hitting the window.

He sat upright in bed, pulse racing, and it took him a long while to figure out why his heart felt like it might beat out of his chest at any moment. _Rain._ How long had it been since he'd felt the rain? How long had it been since he'd been on a planet that even understood the concept?

Lance tossed his blankets off, cursing softly as his foot tangled in the sheet, then stood and carefully tiptoed over and around the other figures cluttering the living room floor. The last few days had been... hectic, to say the least. Between the refugees from Project Balmera—people who, like Val, had been stuffed full of crystals in the Galra Empire's attempt to engineer "renewable energy"—trying to get in contact with their families, the rest of the castle's crew looking for their first taste of Earth, and the fact that no one but the Mendozas had a house in Carlsbad, now that the Holt house was full of bullets and blood...

Yeah. It was a little bit crowded.

Lance didn't mind, though. He'd surrendered his bedroom to Hunk's moms, Eli had taken over Mateo's room, and Karen Holt took the last actual bed in Luz's room. Shiro and his brother were staying at Lance's aunt and uncle's house, along with Val and the Alteans. Everyone else—barring the handful of aliens who had opted to stay on the castle-ship, where they could be ready for a surprise attack from deep space—was gathered in the living room with Lance. Luz and Mateo slept one on either side of Lance's sleeping bag, Matt and Pidge huddled together by the stairs, and Hunk got the sofa by simple right of being the first one to fall asleep last night. No one had wanted to risk trampling him when they inevitably stayed up much later playing ridiculous games.

Lance crossed to the couch now, tapping Hunk's foot a few times until he startled awake and ran a hand down his face. "Lance? What time is it?"

"I'm not sure." Lance looked toward the kitchen, but he couldn't see the stove clock from this angle. By the weak gray light coming through the window, he guessed it was still early. "Doesn't matter. Listen."

Hunk cocked his head to the side, and Lance grinned as the rhythmic patter of raindrops filled the silence. His whole body felt lighter for the sound, his pulse quickening to keep pace.

All at once, Hunk shot upright, his mouth dropping open. "Lance--"

"I know!"

"Are you gonna--?"

"Obviously. You want to come? You don't have to."

But Hunk was already on his feet. They tiptoed together to the front door, Lance clutching at Hunk's sleeve to supplement the lip-biting he was already doing to keep from squealing out loud.

_Rain._

"Holy quiznak," Lance whispered once he had a pair of sandals on and finally opened the front door. Hunk glanced backward, probably looking to see whether they'd roused anyone else in their excitement, but Lance couldn't bring himself to care right now. They'd been on Earth for just over a week, and Lance had spent most of that time with his family, telling them an abbreviated version of his story—and leaving out the worst bits. They'd been worried enough once they realized he was fighting a literal war; they didn't need to know about the zombies and the pissing Haggar off and the part where he sent Wyn off to safety in Blue, fully expecting it to get Lance himself killed.

Well. It had been a long week. Longer for some people, considering all the business with the UN. Lance's attention last night had been split between a board game Mateo wanted to teach him, an argument with Pidge over what counted as a humanoid alien, really, and trying to keep track of Karen's conversation with the other adults. He gathered that she and Allura and Shiro had finally reached some sort of conclusion with the UN and most of its member nations, though. Which was good. They'd had pizza and marathoned Star Wars to celebrate—though it had only made Lance want to watch it with the aliens.

Meri had seen it, hadn’t she? Lance couldn’t remember, but she'd lived on Earth for twelve years. She'd probably watched all the sci fi just to make fun of it. Lance knew that was what he would do if he ever got stranded on a planet a couple dozen iPhone generations behind.

So there were a lot of reasons the last week had passed in an almost dream-like state. Lance was _home_ , and he knew he was home, and he'd burst into tears on more than one occasion when it hit him that he had his family back. But so much of it had felt surreal that on some level, he supposed, he kept expecting to wake up and find he'd imagined it all.

Stepping out into the rain, though... That he knew was real. He'd dreamed about rain more than once since leaving home, he'd been to planets that had something like mist or snow filling the air, but none of it had felt right. None of it was like _this._

Lance tilted his head back, letting the rain wash over him. The twilight smelled of wet grass and clean air, and Lance couldn’t stop the laughter that bubbled out of him. He blinked furiously, trying to stare up into the drizzle.

“Hunk,” he said, hearing the splash of footsteps joining him on the driveway. “We made it.”

Hunk leaned over, pressing their shoulders together. He’d stopped long enough to grab a raincoat from the front closet and slip on a pair of shoes—both of which were probably smart choices. It wasn’t exactly frigid out here, but it was November, and it was about four in the morning, and the rain _was_ cold.

Lance didn’t care.

He kicked off his sandals and wriggled his toes in a puddle, relishing the cool silk feel of it against his skin. _God,_ he’d missed this.

He hesitated a moment longer, then grabbed Hunk and towed him away from the house. “Come on,” he said. “There’s a park at the end of the block that has _awesome_ puddles.”

Hunk, to his credit, didn’t argue, and they spent the next hour splashing in puddles and squelching through the mud. Lance must have laughed more in that hour than he had since leaving Earth. His sides hurt by the time he gave in to Hunk’s pleas to go home and get something warm to drink. His pajamas were soaked through, the cuffs of his pants rolled up to his knees to keep them out of the mud that splattered his feet and ankles. He felt like a kid again, reckless and messy and sniffling with the chill, but, hell, didn’t he deserve to be a kid again, if only for a little while? Allura had promised them all another week on Earth—seven more days with their families before those of them who chose to leave again plunged back into the war.

Lance was going. Of _course_ he was. He didn’t want to leave home, but he _couldn’t_ abandon the others to the war. He couldn’t abandon Blue.

As they headed home, Lance’s high spirits began to fall, despite Hunk’s every effort to distract him with stories of beach combing as a kid, finding only the coolest shells to take home and spending hours leaning over tide pools. The problem, Lance knew, was that his house was a study in conflicting desires. It was everything that pulled at Lance to stay home and forget the horrors of the Galra Empire, but threaded through with reminders of why that was no longer possible.

Almost everyone had already made their decisions. Shiro was staying on as a paladin (as though that had ever been in doubt) and Akira, having emphatically cut ties with the Garrison, was coming along. Matt, too, was in it for the long haul, as was Hunk—there had been a bit of a “discussion” there, mostly to do with the fact that Hunk was still seventeen and his parents, understandably, wanted him safe.

Lance was, at least, lucky in that regard. He’d turned eighteen sometime when they were out risking their lives, so his parents had been forced to admit that the choice of what to do was his own. The Kahales had ultimately reached that point themselves, as Hunk’s birthday was less than two months away. They could keep him home, but everyone knew he would leave again as soon as he turned eighteen, and holding him back until then would only breed resentment.

The only one still in limbo was Pidge.

They were already at it by the time Lance and Hunk walked in, angry voices drifting down the stairs and reverberating around the floorboards of what Lance guessed was Luz’s room. All three Holts were conspicuous by their absence, and everyone else gathered in the kitchen and living room looked more than a little uncomfortable—all except for Mateo, who was still dead to the world.

Luz laughed at the sight of Lance and Hunk, drawing the adults’ attention.

“There you are,” Rosario said, pressing a hand to her chest. A twinge of guilt shot through Lance at the strain in her voice. He supposed she _would_ be a little more nervous after he’d up and vanished on her the first time. She forced a smile, though, and lightened her voice as she asked, “Breakfast?”

Lance looked down at his muddy feet and hummed uncertainly.

Rolling his eyes, Hunk took off his shoes and coat and pressed a fingertip to Lance’s forehead. “Stay. I’ll get towels.” He disappeared around the corner, but his voice drifted back to them. “Is Mama in the kitchen?”

“Do you even have to ask?” Eli replied, sipping coffee and grinning as Akani leaned her head out of the kitchen to scowl at him.

Hunk laughed. “I’ll be there in a second. Here.” He tossed one of the older towels at Lance, who raised it in salute and started wiping down his feet. Once he was sure he wouldn’t be tracking mud all over the house, he tossed the towel into the laundry room and headed upstairs to change into dry clothes. The arguing voices grew louder as he approached, and he did his best not to eavesdrop, but… well, that wasn’t exactly _easy._

“You’re _fourteen_ , Pidge,” Karen Holt said, her voice dripping with fatigue and desperation. “The fact that these people expect you to fight a war for them? It’s—It’s a _war crime_!”

Pidge’s voice, when they replied, was acerbic. This was an argument that had been dragging on for the better part of the week, and Pidge had steadily lost patience as it proceeded. “This may come as a _surprise_ to you, Mom, but guess what? Zarkon doesn’t put much stock in the _Geneva Convention!_ ”

Lance ducked into his room, humming tunelessly to try to drown out the words. Pidge’s sharp, “They didn’t _recruit_ me. I volunteered!” broke through his efforts.

“That doesn’t mean it’s okay!” Karen’s voice very nearly reached a shout—not as rare an event the last couple days as it had been at first, but still a shock. Lance had seen the videos circulating online. Karen Holt had stared down Iverson and baldly accused him of murder without so much as raising her voice. Hearing her like this was…

Well. Lance hurriedly pulled on a pair of jeans and was headed for the stairs before he’d even finished pulling on his shirt.

“And you!” Karen said as Lance scuttled past. “You’re their brother! Why didn’t you stop them?”

“Gee, Mom, I dunno.” Matt’s voice was low, but no less cutting than the other two. “Maybe I had my own issues to deal with? I’m sorry I got kidnapped and tortured by aliens; next time, I’ll try to be a little less traumatized.”

A horrible, chilled silence descended, and Lance’s heart contracted painfully.

“Matt...” Karen said.

Matt interrupted her before she could go any further. “Sorry. Headache.”

Lance sprinted down the stairs.

Things were… less than great in the Holt family these days. Matt had suffered near-constant migraines since the battle last week, and though he’d spent a considerable amount of time with the Alteans, "working on it," it didn’t seem to be getting better. If any of them knew what was causing the headaches, they weren’t saying, but it left Matt tired and irritable, and the constant arguments between Pidge and Karen didn’t help.

The TV was on when Lance made it downstairs, and his heart plummeted straight into the basement. The volume was turned down, but the images of destruction—leveled buildings, smoking craters in the streets—told their own story. The banner beneath the footage proclaimed another Galra attack--this time in Toronto.

“Shit,” Lance hissed. Luz, sitting on the floor beside Hunk’s uncle, looked up at him, scandalized. Lance flashed her what he hoped was an apologetic smile, then snatched up the remote and turned the TV off.

The Galra hadn’t given up on Earth after the battle. They may have been driven off, and the Kera rebellion might still be patrolling the skies along with the castle-ship, but it was a tall order, protecting an entire planet. Three times in the last week, the Galra had sent through a single warship, which launched fighters that streamed toward the surface as the big guns kept Earth’s protectors occupied. Toronto made six cities hit by the attacks—all of them short-lived, thankfully, but hundreds of people were dead, thousands more injured or homeless.

It was petty vengeance at this point. Lance was sure of it. These attacks would never succeed in conquering the Earth; in fact, all they’d done was speed up the negotiations at the UN. Earth was so desperate for protection, it probably would have signed a treaty with the first aliens to offer. They were just lucky Voltron happened to be the ones who showed up, and that the humans weren’t being asked to provide anything in return except non-aggression treaties between the alien allies and every country with a space program, along with provisions for friendly aliens who took up residence on the surface to help with relief efforts.

Lance’s parents stood together behind the couch, eyes riveted to the dark TV screen. With a sigh, Lance headed over, wracking his mind for some slim comfort to offer.

His mother spoke first. “Are we safe here?”

Lance stopped, breathless. “What?”

“Are we safe here—on Earth?” Rosario tore her gaze away from the television and searched Lance’s face for an answer. “All these attacks… They aren’t going to stop, are they? They’re random now, but what if they realize we’re all clustered together here in Carlsbad? What if they decide to target us?”

Images of the house in ruins, of his family lying dead on the lawn, forced their way into Lance’s head, and he shivered. “You’ll be fine,” he said at once. “Our allies will keep you safe.”

“Can they, though?” Ramon rubbed his wife’s back soothingly. “Can anyone?”

“I...” Lance hesitated, face crumpling as he fought down a wave of despair. “What else can we do?”

His parents traded looks—they’d already talked about this. Tensing, Rosario said, “We could come with you. On that castle-ship of yours.”

“Come—are you _crazy?_ ” Lance jerked back, glancing over to where Eli and Luz were suddenly staring at him. He dropped his voice. “You want to take Luz and Mateo into _battle_?”

“Hunk’s family is going,” Ramon pointed out.

“Hunk’s family doesn’t have _kids_ to worry about!”

Lance was shaking. He realized that belatedly and wondered when that had started. Shit. It had been bad enough, having his family on the castle during the last battle—and there had literally been enemy ships attacking Carlsbad then. He didn’t think he could survive an entire war knowing his family was in danger all the time.

Rosario grabbed him by the elbows, waiting in silence until he met her eyes. “Can you honestly say that we’re safer here than with you?” she asked. “Because I’ll stay, if you think we are.”

Lance hesitated, but there was really no question. “You’d be safer on the castle-ship,” he said, and tried not to feel sick as his parents nodded, the matter apparently settled.

“Okay, then. We’ll start packing.”

Rain continued to beat against the walls, but somehow it didn’t feel as comforting as before.

* * *

“I’ll leave.”

Matt sighed at the stubborn expression on Pidge’s face. Their mother went rigid, breath hissing through her teeth. “What did you say?”

Pidge lifted their chin, eyes sparking with a stubbornness Matt knew all too well. “I said I’ll leave. You want to tell me I’m not allowed to be a paladin anymore? Fine! I’ll just track down a Galra ship that’s still in decent condition—god knows I have about a million of them to choose from! Then I’ll go look for Dad alone.” They crossed their arms. “This isn’t a choice between me going to war and me staying home all safe and docile. It’s a choice between me going to war alone or with a team to watch my back.”

Karen looked far too pale, like she might pass out at any moment, so Matt stepped in, ignoring the cleaver hacking away at his temples.

“You’re not going out there alone, Pidge. _Not_ because I don’t think you could handle yourself,” he added quickly, because Pidge looked like they might punch him otherwise. “I just mean it’s not going to come to that.”

“They are _not_ getting involved in this war,” Karen said. Shock and disbelief had stayed her tongue in the first days after Matt and Pidge's return, and negotiations with the UN had kept the early arguments to brief, heated spats, but now that Karen was done with that, things had come to a head--and Matt didn't think he had it in him to smooth this over. He could hear the desperation building in his mother's voice, a desperation that had grown day by day as the reality of war sank in.

“I’m _already_ involved!” Pidge’s voice was shrill enough to set off fireworks behind Matt’s eyes, and he winced, screwing his eyes shut. “Zarkon dragged me into this fight the day he took Dad and Matt and Shiro. I’m just trying to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

“You shouldn't have to, Pidge. You’re just a kid.”

“I know!” Pidge deflated suddenly, dropping down onto the twin bed behind them. “I know, okay? But I _do_ have to. I’m one of exactly twelve people in the entire universe who can actually make a difference. If I don’t fight, people are going to die. A lot of people. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I walked away now.”

“So I’m just supposed to be okay with this? With you risking your life? With you on the _front lines?_ ”

“No!” Pidge gave a feeble laugh. “ _None_ of us is okay with any of this, Mom. It sucks, and _no one_ should have to do this, least of all a bunch of kids. But the rules are different when it comes to Voltron. They _have_ to be, or we might as well surrender to Zarkon now. We can’t fight him without Voltron, and Voltron can’t afford to lose a paladin.”

Karen pressed her thumbs to the corners of her eyes, drawing in a long, slow breath. After a moment, she looked up, meeting Matt’s eyes. “And I suppose you feel the same?”

A hollow ache pounded in Matt’s chest in time with his migraine. “I hate this,” he admitted. “I never wanted to be a soldier, and I sure as hell never wanted Pidge to end up in this position. Believe me, Mom, if I thought we stood a chance without them, I would have locked them in the closet to keep them out of battle. But I know what the Galra do to people. When the Green Lion chose Pidge, I didn’t—I wasn’t--” He shook his head, swallowing against a swell of tears. “All I could think of was that it meant there was one more thing standing between me and getting recaptured. And we needed every scrap of power we could get. Without Pidge, without _any of us_ , we wouldn’t have made it home. Without them, we still might die.”

He trailed off as a sob ripped itself from Karen’s body. She pressed one hand to her mouth and wrapped the other arm around her midsection, her fingers white-knuckled as she tried to hold in her grief. Matt’s eyes burned with tears that almost managed to distract from his migraine and he stepped forward, pulling his mother into a hug.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he choked out. “I’m _sorry_. But I’m not going to stop Pidge from helping.”

“As if you even could.” Pidge sniffed once, and Karen held out an arm in invitation. Pidge stood on shaky legs and fell into the embrace, squeezing Karen so tight she wheezed.

“You’re a _child_ , Pidge,” she said weakly, almost a plea.

Pidge’s hand looped around Karen’s back and found Matt’s wrist, squeezing tight enough to hurt. “No, I'm not” they said. “Not anymore.”

* * *

It felt odd to be alone in the cockpit of the Blue Lion. Even now, after three battles without her fellow blue paladins and countless hours of patrols and training, Nyma still felt out of place. This was what she’d wanted, back when she’d had the brilliant idea to steal a Voltron Lion. Just her and the Lion and the strength to stand up and defy the Galra Empire.

Of course, back then she’d imagined Rolo would be at her side. She’d imagined it would still be just the three of them, proud and defiant and staring down certain death, burning bright for a few years, if they were lucky, before they went the same way as their old crew.

She’d certainly imagined herself fighting somewhere far away from here.

“All clear this way,” she said, ripping her thoughts out of the same old patterns she always fell into when her thoughts turned toward Rolo. He was dead now—she hoped he was, because the alternative was a torturous decline at the hands of Haggar’s druids. She breathed in, sitting up straighter as Blue rumbled something like comfort through the bond.

 _Should have brought Beezer along_ , she thought, trying not to focus on the unsettling sensation of having another presence in her mind.

“It is the same here,” Shay said. She and Ryner were patrolling the planet’s northern hemisphere, while Nyma and Keith took the south. The Empire hadn’t yet launched an attack so close on the heels of the last, but it was only a matter of time. Right now Earth was Voltron’s greatest weakness, and they didn’t have the resources to protect it, even with the support of the Kera Rebellion. Sooner or later, Zarkon would realize that a constant stream of attacks would wear the defenders down. It didn’t matter if the first ninety-nine raids ended in victory for Earth and its allies if number one hundred left the planet decimated.

It was either that or Zarkon would turn his attention to the Kera Sector, where many of Anamuri’s rebels had families of their own. A strike there could draw off most of Earth’s support _and_ serve as retribution against the people who dared defy his rule. And before anyone quite knew how it had happened, they’d all be dead and no one would ever remember the people who had _almost_ overthrown Zarkon.

Nyma had seen this story play out enough times to know how it ended.

“So how much longer are we going to keep looking?” she drawled, spinning Blue in a lazy spiral that did just as much good as squinting at empty space for hours on end.

“Until we find something,” Keith snapped. “Zarkon isn’t done with Earth yet. We _have_ to be ready for him next time.”

Nyma scoffed. “Right. And by the time anyone shows up, how long will we have been at it? There’s no use running ourselves into the ground.”

“We _are_ all tired,” Ryner cut in calmly. Nyma’s eyes flickered to the video feeds beside her and found three expressions that mirrored her own thoughts. For all Keith’s blustering, for all Ryner’s outward calm, for all Shay looked like she wanted nothing more than to be left out of this argument, they were all scared, and frustrated, and edging toward despair—just like Nyma.

Good. It meant they had at least a _little_ common sense. She’d been starting to wonder.

“We’ll go back soon,” Ryner went on. “We just have to… work through our tension. It does us no good to go back and have paranoia keep us awake when we should be resting.”

“Is it really paranoia if it’s justified?” Nyma asked, because she was about ten light-years past consideration and three hours short on sleep, and keeping her mouth closed just didn’t seem to be worth the effort. “These attacks keep coming when we’re least prepared, even after we switched up our routine. Are we _sure_ there isn’t a spy in Anamuri’s forces? Or on the castle-ship?”

A low growl sounded over the comms. “Who, _exactly_ , are you accusing?” Keith asked.

Nyma let her head loll back against the seat. “I’m not accusing anyone of anything. I’m just saying, it’s weird that these attacks keep catching us flat-footed.”

That, and Nyma knew how much people changed when survival was on the line. Unbidden, an image of her old neighbor, a man named Havi, rose in her mind. She’d seen him talking to Galra officers the day before her parents’ shop was raided, and he’d stayed conspicuously distant in the aftermath. She had no real proof he was the one who had tipped the Empire off, of course, and she couldn’t have blamed him for protecting himself even if he _had_ \--

And Blue _certainly_ didn’t have any reason to be poking around in those old memories.

The foreign presence in her head gave a start as Nyma became fully aware of it, and it hastily retreated, leaving behind the faint impression of an apology. Their bond was still too tenuous for anything resembling a conversation, but intent carried through just fine, so she knew (though she didn’t particularly _want_ to) that Blue was just trying to understand.

Nyma sighed, feeling suddenly drained. “Whatever,” she muttered. “Look, guys, there’s nothing out here, okay? You do what you gotta do, but I’m going to go back and try to--”

_Brrip!_

Nyma stared dumbly at her scanners, mind slow to process the lone dot that had just appeared halfway to the edge of Blue’s range. She tensed, readying herself for a fight before she realized that no other ships had followed the first.

“What the…? Keith, you seeing this?”

“Yep.” All trace of irritability was gone from Keiths’ voice, and the Red Lion looped around to join Nyma and Blue, bristling. “Let’s go check it out.”

Nyma pursed her lips. “I don’t suppose _no thanks_ is an option here...”

“What is it?” Ryner asked. The scanners showed that both she and Shay had stopped their patrols, as though debating coming to join Nyma and Keith.

Keith was already heading for the intruder, tight-lipped and scowling, so Nyma explained as she followed after him. “Looks like a single ship just wormholed in near the edge of the system.”

“Only one ship?” Shay asked. “A warship, perhaps?”

Nyma shook her head. “Smaller. Fighter, maybe. It’s weird.”

“Be careful,” Ryner cautioned, as though Nyma weren’t already plotting three difference escape routes. “Just say the word if things get dangerous. We’ll be there in two ticks.”

Nyma flicked two fingers in a halfhearted salute, pushing Blue even faster to keep up with Keith, whose pace screamed _scared out of his shit_ at the top of its lungs.

Then again, Nyma wasn’t much better.

Within seconds, the ship came into view—not a fighter, but a style of ship Nyma didn’t recognize. It certainly looked Imperial in design, and too small to carry more than half a dozen soldiers. As threats went, it wasn’t particularly impressive. Nyma clicked through the other scans, waiting for the moment an entire army appeared from thin air. Haggar did have a Vkullor egg now, after all, and the creatures were supposed to be masters of stealth.

No. She was being ridiculous. Nyma didn’t care how obsessive and dangerously brilliant Haggar was; she couldn’t replicate the Vkullor’s cloaking abilities _and_ install it in an entire fleet in less than two weeks. There was no way.

Was there?

“Lions...”

The voice on the comms startled Nyma so bad she almost opened fire on the ship on reflex. The canon on the tip of Red’s tail actually started glowing before Keith got himself under control. Blushing furiously, Nyma pulled up the open comms channel, scowling when it showed no visual connection.

“You must be the paladins of Voltron,” the voice went on. It was deep, faintly accented, soft around the edges with either pain or fatigue. The translator identified the language as Galran.

Nyma caught Keith’s eyes over the comms and raised an eyebrow.

He frowned. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Why did Zarkon send you?”

“ _Zarkon_ didn’t send me, Keith.”

The breath left Keith in a rush, and Nyma was pretty sure the rumble she heard came from the Red Lion. She sounded _pissed._

“How do you know my name?”

The stranger chuckled. “I should think half the Empire knows your name by now, Keith. The Legacy Prince who threw his lot in with a prisoner, turned against his fellow soldiers, _left_ the Empire to join up with the paladins of Voltron…? You’re a regular celebrity back home.”

“The Empire isn’t my home,” Keith snarled.

“I wasn’t talking about the Empire.”

A long stretch of silence followed this statement. Nyma kept her eyes on Keith, who seemed torn between curiosity and suspicion. His hands never left Red’s controls, and unless Nyma was totally off her game, he had his fingers hovering over the triggers, ready to blast this chatty mystery guest out of the sky at the first sign of a trap.

He didn’t, though, and that gave the stranger time to switch on his camera, giving them both a good look at him. He was Galra, and he wore eighty percent of an Imperial officer’s uniform—the helm was missing, the breastplate cracked, and one entire sleeve just _gone_. What fur was visible was singed black if not burned away completely, showing smooth, shiny scars. Fresh scars, Nyma thought.

“Yikes,” she muttered. “Who put you through a reactor core?”

The man chuckled, his eyes shutting as he lifted a hand to his scarred shoulder. “The burns are my own doing, I’m afraid. Most of the rest comes down to a good friend of mine—and her twenty-odd armed guards.”

“Some friend.” Keith shifted his grip on Red’s controls, relaxing only marginally. “So are you planning on telling us who you are and why you’re here?”

The stranger sat up straighter with some effort, holding his head high. “My name is--”

“Thace drul Vessely,” Nyma said, snapping her fingers. “I knew I recognized you.” It _was_ the same face, once she managed to look past all the wounds.

Thace’s ears twitched once in surprise. Then he sighed. “The _smugglers_?” he asked.

“One of ‘em, anyway. I’d ask how you’ve been, but I already know the answer.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were one of the paladins.”

Nyma lifted a shoulder. “Yeah. Kinda surprised me, too.”

“Wait,” said Keith, holding up a hand. “You know this guy?”

Wrinkling her nose, Nyma considered Thace. “I don’t know that I’d go _that_ far. We met once. Rolo and I were stealing some weapons, Thace and a friend of his were… you know, I’m not totally sure, but they definitely didn’t want their Empire buddies to know about it. They were the ones who told us about Project Balmera, actually.”

That did it. Nyma saw the moment Thace switched from ‘potential enemy’ to ‘fellow rebel’ in Keith’s eyes. He cocked his head to the side and studied Thace for a moment, then sighed. “Allura and Shiro are going to want to talk to him.”

“Take him back, then?”

Keith nodded. “Besides,” he said, voice souring with a lingering trace of suspicion Nyma _totally_ wasn’t complaining about. “He looks like he could use a few hours in a cryopod.”

* * *

“ _Focus._ ”

“I’m _trying_ , Allura. It’s kind of hard when my head’s doing its best impression of a supernova.” Matt opened his eyes, then immediately regretted it when the bright sunlight reminded him of the migraine that had only intensified since starting today’s training session. It had been just him and Meri for most of the last week, but now that things were cleared up with the UN, Allura had joined in. Apparently she was marginally more familiar with these sorts of things, though it was her father who had personal experience.

Matt sighed, massaging his forehead as the tattered remnants of his focus slipped away, leaving him settled squarely in his own body on a gentle, grassy slope in the park down the road from Lance’s house. The ground was still soft from last night’s rain, but the skies had cleared shortly after dawn, the temperature climbing into the seventies as the day progressed, and by now all that remained of the shower was some dried mud on the sidewalk and a few dark patches in the shadows that had still been puddles when Matt, Meri, and Allura had arrived.

Quintessence. Earth was teeming with it—half-glimpsed currents in the air added an extra vibrancy to the trees, the grass, even the people enjoying the afternoon on the other side of the park. The sky was the worst—bright enough that it hurt to lift his eyes above the bushes scattered along the path and a shade of blue Matt had never seen before, halfway between aquamarine and the faint blue-white shimmer of Quintessence itself.

“You’re distracted again,” Meri prodded. “Want to take a break?”

“No.” Matt screwed his eyes shut—only partially for the sake of cutting out distractions. How long had he been getting these headaches now? He thought he knew, but was that just confirmation bias speaking? Maybe he’d gotten headaches even before Haggar possessed Shiro and pumped Matt’s body full of Quintessence.

He didn’t think so.

After all, it was that influx of Quintessence that had altered Matt’s left eye, turning the iris from hazel to crystal blue. Quintessence blue, even. And it was that eye that now, suddenly, could see the currents of Quintessence in the world around him.

Matt had an astigmatism—his cornea was irregularly curved so the light didn’t properly focus on his retinas. It was one reason he’d always preferred contacts and had, in fact, already gone back to wearing them (his mother having saved the extra pairs he’d left at home when he set out for Kerberos, bless her). The lenses were weighted at the bottom to help them orient and correct the blurriness his glasses never _quite_ cleared up. Sometimes, though, the lenses slipped, twisting just enough for one eye to go out of focus.

This was similar, except the headache that resulted was orders of magnitude worse and no amount of blinking and rubbing his eyes could make things snap back into focus. His vision in his left eye was perpetually double-exposed, Quintessence layered over top of ordinary light, and it left him feeling off balance.

“You know, we have glasses that filter out blue light here on Earth,” Matt mused, keeping his eyes closed as he tipped his head back to catch the warmth of the sun. He could almost imagine he still saw Quintessence swirling behind his eyelid. He thought it might have been his own. “Do you think we could make something like that, but to filter out Quintessence? Reduce eye strain and all that?”

Allura caught herself at the last second, so instead of an exasperated sigh, she let out a mildly constipated sigh. “Slow your breathing,” she said. So, okay, they were starting from the top.

That was probably fair.

Matt breathed in, willing himself to follow along as Allura walked him through the Altean meditation exercises she thought might help him learn to make sense of the jumble of new sensory input that was currently making his brain scream soundlessly into the void. Meri joined in, partially as moral support, partially in an attempt to help _her_ figure out how Quintessence flows worked. She’d done her best to help Matt, but “I don’t know, _use the Force, Luke_?” was borderline counterproductive advice because all it did was get them off on a Star Wars tangent.

They were ten minutes deep into the visualization exercises when Matt’s new phone chirped a factory-standard text alert. He hadn’t spent much time fiddling with something that was going to turn into a seldom-used camera and a slightly-less-seldom-used mp3 player as soon as they left the surface.

But his mom had been understandably concerned with communication, and she’d already bought it, anyway, so Matt acquiesced to her request that he keep it with him with the volume turned up at all times.

“Sorry,” he said to Allura, snatching up his phone and squinting against the sunlight to read the text. “It’s from Shiro? Uh...” He read the message twice more, but the feeling that something somewhere had just shifted out of alignment didn’t go away. “Your comms are off, I’m guessing?”

Allura reached for her pocket at once—she’d reluctantly deferred to Meri’s judgment and traded her Altean outfits for a blouse and jeans when she went out in public. Matt wasn’t convinced she wasn’t going to burn the whole lot of it the second they returned to the castle-ship.

“They are,” Allura said, breathless. “Why? Is something wrong?”

“Not— _no_ ,” Matt said slowly. “Just… Apparently, and I quote, ‘Keith’s uncle is on the castle-ship.’”

Allura’s head snapped up. “His _what?_ ”

Matt held up both hands in a feeble defense. “That’s what it says.” He flipped the phone sideways and typed out a quick reply. “Shiro’s running Coran up. He wants to pick us up on the way.”

“Of course.” Allura leaped to her feet, glanced down at herself with a look of consternation, then primly brushed off her jeans and nodded to Matt. “We’ll pick this up later.”

* * *

The new arrival was still in a cryopod when Shiro arrived with the others. Lance, Pidge, and Hunk were still on the ground; Matt had called to let them know what was happening, but Shiro hadn’t wanted to delay any longer than he already had, not after hearing the turmoil in Keith’s voice as he explained the situation. Someone else could go pick up the last three paladins if it proved necessary.

Keith’s uncle slept in the cryo chamber, his skin knitting together into thick scars and large bald patches that spoke of a nasty fight not long ago. Shiro wondered if he could have picked out the family resemblance without all those wounds. He hadn’t thought Keith had any surviving relatives, but Nyma had vouched for Thace, and Shiro couldn’t see what reason he would have to lie.

Coran slipped past Shiro where he’d stopped in the pod room door and went to join Shay at the central console. She was looking over some scans, and she smiled feebly as Coran joined her.

“These wounds are all several days old,” she said, “and it appears he spent some time in a healing chamber of lesser potency than ours. I do not think we will be able to erase the scars entirely at this point.”

Shiro didn’t stay to hear more, but joined Keith by the cryopod. “How’s he doing?”

Tension radiated off Keith, gathering in the claws that dug into the sleeve of his armor, in the ears pinned back against his scalp. “I mean, it’s not like he was dying when we found him, so… fine, I guess.”

“All right.” Shiro stepped closer, though he held back from touching Keith just yet. “How are _you_ doing?”

For a moment, Keith tensed still further, glancing over his shoulder as though expecting an audience. Allura and Meri had joined the others at the central console, whispering furiously and paying Keith no mind. Val stood with Nyma and Ryner along the back wall, well out of earshot of a quiet conversation. Only Matt and Akira had followed Shiro over to the pods, and Matt offered Keith a sympathetic smile as he stepped up on his other side, jostling shoulders as he did so.

Keith relaxed, shoulders slumping as Shiro laid a hand on his arm. “I’m… surprised, I guess. I don’t know. He’s my uncle, Shiro. I didn’t even know I _had_ an uncle!”

Shiro was quiet for a long moment, watching Keith’s face. He didn’t broadcast his emotions the way someone like Lance or Hunk might, but neither did he do a good job masking his feelings—not to someone who knew him as well as Shiro did. There was uncertainty in the occasional twitch of his ears, nervousness in the strength of his grip on his own arms, but mostly what Shiro saw was hurt.

And was that any surprise? Keith had been alone for over a year, and before that he’d only had his father, who barely deserved that distinction. He hadn’t had anything even remotely resembling a real family since his mother died—and that was, what, twelve years ago? Thirteen?

Shiro couldn’t imagine finding out more than a decade later that there was someone else who just had never bothered to step in.

“Is he your dad’s brother? Or your mom’s?” Matt asked.

Keith gave him an odd look, like he couldn’t fathom why Matt would ask. “My mom’s…?”

“Then… he’s with the Accords?”

The cryopod beeped to indicate the cycle was nearing its end, and Keith tensed once more. “That’s what he said.”

The Accords. Shiro glanced to the trio of Alteans, wondering how much of their hushed conversation revolved around that claim. Did Meri even _know_ about the Accords? The rest of them had only heard the name for the first time a few weeks ago. They were a resistance movement acting at least partially within the Galra Empire itself.

There were some indications that the Accords had ties to Altean survivors—even to the planet called New Altea.

“Do you trust him?” Shiro asked Keith.

Keith laughed once. “How can I? I don’t know anything about him.” Keith ducked his head, peering through his bangs at Thace’s still form. “Why do you think he decided to show his face _now_?”

“He didn’t say anything before you put him in?” Akira asked, startled.

Keith shook his head. “Said it was easier to wait for the black paladins. All he would tell us was that he was with the Accords and had a message for Voltron. And that he’s my uncle.”

“Seems normal,” Akira said dryly. He glanced at Shiro, then squared his shoulders. “All right. How do you want us to play this?”

“What?” Keith’s brow furrowed, and he looked to Matt for an explanation. Matt just shrugged. “How do I want you to play _what_?”

“This.” Akira gestured toward the cryopod—an awkward gesture, as he had both his hands shoved into his jean pockets and ended up just sort of rolling his shoulder toward it. “The uncle situation. Do you need someone to punch him in the nose? Because I could be okay with that.”

A sigh and a laugh tried to break out of Shiro simultaneously, and he bit down on both. “ _Akira..._ ”

Akira turned and walked backwards toward the pod, putting himself in front of Shiro, Keith, and Matt, his face the picture of falsified innocence. “What? You _know_ I’m good at picking fights.” His dark eyes flickered to Keith. “No punching? Okay—interrogation, then? I think the four of us can collectively hit him with so many questions he won’t have time to think of a lie. Or—okay. I know the shovel talk is traditionally reserved for romantic partners, but I’ve always thought that was needlessly narrowminded.”

Keith’s ears had eased their slope, fear and hurt momentarily forgotten in the raw confusion Akira was so good at spreading. “The… shovel talk?”

“Yeah,” Matt said, grinning. “Like… a girl introduces her new boyfriend to her dad, who takes him aside and says--” He pitched his voice low and gruff, and Shiro had to laugh at his impersonation of an overprotective dad; clearly the inspiration didn’t come from Commander Holt. “’If you ever do anything to hurt my daughter, I’ll make you pay.’”

Akira snorted. “Yeah, okay, if you want to be all stereotypical and take the verve out of it.”

Keith glanced between them, still frowning. “And _where_ does the shovel come in?”

“The implication is that the dad will murder the boyfriend and bury the body somewhere no one will find it,” Shiro said quickly, because Akira looked all too happy to jump in with more gruesome details. “And we’re _not_ going to threaten this man the second he wakes up.”

“It doesn’t have to be the _second_ he wakes up,” Matt muttered sullenly.

Akira just shrugged, Shiro’s words rolling off him (as usual.) “It’s not a threat, Takashi. It’s a fair warning.”

Shiro sighed again, but Keith just laughed—which of course made Akira positively preen with smug satisfaction. Shiro was seriously regretting introducing these two. It had only been a week, and they were already feeding off each other. He didn’t want to think about how far over their heads they’d get the first time they went into battle together.

“Thanks,” Keith said, ears still quivering with amusement. “But Shiro’s right. We should at least hear him out.”

“ _And_ you want first crack at him,” Akira said with a nod. “I hear you, kid. You just let me know if you want me to step in.”

“I’ll… I’ll do that.”

The cryopod hissed again, and Akira reluctantly moved aside as Coran called out that the cycle was winding down. Matt hovered close to Keith, bristling with protective rage, and Shiro squeezed Keith’s shoulder, trying to inject the situation with a modicum of calm. Thace hadn’t shown any signs of hostility, as far as Shiro knew, which meant there was still a chance that he was who and what he claimed. Shiro hoped so; having a relative who wasn’t dead or an utter bastard might be good for Keith.

The room remained utterly still for a moment as vapor trailed out of the vents on the side of the pod and the temperature indicator began to rise. Then Nyma muttered a curse and stepped into the vacuum surrounding the pod, catching Thace as the pod released him.

Val was close behind, grabbing his other arm and helping to steady him as he shook off the cryosleep fog. He was relatively slender, for a Galra, but he had his species' height, and Val looked almost comically small next to him—not quite six feet and barely up to his shoulder when he sagged against her.

“How are you doing?” Val asked.

Thace lifted his head, frowning at her for a long moment. “I am well. Forgive me. Who are you?”

“Val Mendoza. I was part of Project Balmera, so as I understand it I kind of owe you my life.” She smiled weakly and gave a feeble, “Hey.”

The words seemed to thaw the rest of the room, and Allura hurried forward to greet Thace, Coran and Meri close behind. Shay retreated to the back of the room, where Ryner still stood, both of them watchful and wary. Shiro stayed by Keith, who had gone rigid, his eyes wide as he stared at his uncle.

“Greetings, Thace of the Accords,” Allura said formally. “I am Princess Allura of Altea, Paladin of the Black Lion. This is Takashi Shirogane of Earth, Paladin of the Black Lion.” She extended an arm toward Shiro, who dropped his hand from Keith’s shoulder long enough to give a polite bow. His parents had relaxed their observance of Japanese customs since moving to the States, but Shiro had spent enough time in Japan and had enough relatives come to visit that proper etiquette remained second-nature—especially times like now when he was at a loss for a suitable alternative. Handshakes, he’d learned, were usually met with confusion if not outright suspicion, and a salute was entirely out of the question.

“You wanted to speak with us?” Shiro asked after he’d straightened.

For a moment so brief Shiro almost didn’t catch it, Thace glanced to Keith. Then he was back to focusing on Allura. He pulled away from Val and Nyma, straightening to his (considerable) height. He had to be at least eight feet, and had more than a head on Nyma, who was otherwise the tallest person in the room. A few of the Galra refugees were of a similar height, but they mostly kept to themselves, except for Zuza and Tev—teenagers and therefore not yet fully grown—and Zelka, an older woman but still a good foot shorter than Thace.

“Yes,” Thace said. “I am a member of the Accords—an undercover operation tasked with learning the secrets of Zarkon’s empire and paving the way for its eventual demise.”

Matt crossed his arms. “Good job on the undercover part there. You look like you blew up half a warship.”

“Not quite half,” Thace said. His voice held no emotion, and it silenced the room, but his ears quivered in amusement, and Keith’s lifted—intrigued, Shiro thought. Still wary, but open to the possibility that this man was who he said he was. “But, yes. My last assignment turned up a force of augmented cybernetic creatures—I trust you received my warning about them?”

“That was you?” Ryner asked, more intrigued than skeptical. Thace nodded, and she smiled. “Then we owe our thanks once more. Your warning saved many lives.”

Thace closed his eyes, the set of his shoulders easing. “Aside from the force already stationed on Earth, there were four contingents ready for deployment and a lab where more were being assembled.” He paused as Meri whispered, _Shit_ , then continued. “One was deployed, presumably to Earth, before I could stop it. I destroyed everything else at the cost of my cover and...” One ear twitched violently, and he scowled, leaving the thought unfinished. “I consider it a worthwhile trade, but it does mean I am effectively retired from the life of a spy.”

Keith snorted, which made Thace’s eyes dart his way again. He opened his mouth as though to say something before thinking better of it.

“In any case, I was sent here by our Spymaster on behalf of the High Council of New Altea.”

Allura breathed in sharply, one hand stretching behind her and latching onto Coran’s wrist. “New Altea,” she said in a strangled voice. “Then the rumors are true?”

Thace nodded. “For ten thousand years, we have bided our time, gathering our strength and preserving our cultures. We have fought back where we could, but no one planet can stand against Zarkon’s might. Now that Voltron has returned, however, the time has come to fight. The Council formally extends an invitation to you, Black Paladins of Voltron, to come to New Altea and establish a treaty.”

Shiro didn’t have to look at Allura to feel her shock and elation. It lapped at him like waves at the edge of a vast sea, some of it echoing through the bond they both shared with the Black Lion, some of it pure empathy. For weeks now, Allura had been trying to keep a lid on her hope. The rumors of New Altea promised the return of something she’d thought lost—not the people she’d lost, but their descendants. The culture Zarkon had tried so furiously to stamp out.

This offer, handed to her almost casually (Thace’s formal tone and language notwithstanding) must seem too good to be true.

“We would be honored to accompany you to New Altea,” Shiro said, stepping forward so that Allura had a moment to gather herself. She flashed him a grateful smile, blinking furiously, and Shiro nodded in return. He hesitated, glancing back toward Shay.

She’d approached him and Allura a few days ago with a proposal. The survivors of Project Balmera all had the same synthetic Balmera crystals embedded in their bodies, the way Matt and Val did, and because humans produced an excess of Quintessence, those crystals had a tendency to grow. With minimal growth, the crystals were only painful, but if left unchecked it could quickly turn life-threatening.

So far, Shay was the only healer they had who could treat the growing crystals without just leaving the victims in a cryopod set to drain excess Quintessence. She’d volunteered to return to her Balmera, once the temporary reprieve was over and Hunk and the other paladins returned to the castle, to ask for volunteers to come to Earth and treat the survivors. It was a risky plan, especially for the healers who volunteered, but no one expected people who had been kidnapped and experimented on by aliens to willingly go to live on an alien planet until a cure was found—if such a thing existed at all. That Matt and Val were committed to staying on the castle-ship was miracle enough.

Their main problem right now was that any movement away from Earth left it vulnerable. The Kera Rebellion alone wasn’t a strong enough defense, and Zarkon wouldn’t wait long once Voltron was out of the picture to enact his revenge.

A glance at Allura showed she was thinking along similar lines. If New Altea had the military might, the defensive technology, or the sheer numbers to make the Earth defensible—and the paladins were more likely to find that sort of aid there than elsewhere—then an alliance had to be the first priority.

“We will come,” Allura said, straightening. “How soon can we leave?”

“Immediately,” said Thace. “However… There is a defensive zone around the planet. You cannot open a wormhole to New Altea itself; it will refract into neutral space.”

Shiro frowned. “That makes sense. How close can we get?”

“About thirty-two _celipheros_.” Thace paused, noting their confusion. “About three Earth days in our fastest ships, if I have my conversions right."

“Three _days_?” Matt cursed. “And three days back.”

Six days away from Earth—and that assuming New Altea agreed instantly to send aid to Earth, something that Shiro had learned, after a week negotiating a nonaggression treaty with the UN, was more than just unrealistic. “We can’t afford to leave the Earth unprotected for so long.”

“A small team, then,” Allura said, nodding. “I will go, along with Coran and Meri. The rest of you will remain here. You’ll be at a slight disadvantage without the Castle of Lions, but you’ll still have the Lions here to drive out whatever forces Zarkon decides to send.”

Shiro was about to voice his agreement when Matt stepped forward. “I’m going, too.”

Shiro turned to frown at him. “What?”

“I’m going,” Matt repeated. He gave the Alteans a meaningful look. “There might be someone there who can help us.”

“Help with _what_?”

Meri’s mouth rounded in understanding, and Allura nodded. “That’s—that’s actually a very good idea. A… project,” she added, conspicuously avoiding Shiro’s eyes. “We’ve been trying to make something work, but we’d rather not say anything until we’re sure it will pan out.”

Her eyes darted once toward Val, who was still frowning at Matt as though trying to divine his secrets. He squirmed under her attention and looked away.

Something about the crystals, then.

“All right.” Shiro glanced around the room, looking for any further interjections. “The four of you, then, plus Thace.”

“And Keith,” Thace said.

Keith stiffened. “Me? Why me?”

Thace’s ears spoke to a hesitance that didn’t show in his face or in his voice, and Keith’s ears laid back in response. “Your mother asked me to bring you.”

“My--” Keith cut off, lip pulling back in a snarl. “My mother is _dead_.”

“No.” Thace’s shoulders rose and fell silently, and he tucked his hands behind his back. “She is very much alive, and she wishes to see you.”

* * *

“When are you going to be back?”

Matt shoved one last Altean jumpsuit into his duffle bag before zipping it up and turning to face his mother and Pidge. He’d mostly packed Earth clothes—for the novelty of _having_ familiar clothes, if nothing else—but there was no denying that Altean clothes packed better. “Hard to say,” he told Pidge. “We’re taking Red, so we should be able to cut the travel time in half, but still… At least four days, hopefully not longer than a week. Thace said we’ll be able to use New Altea’s secure channels to contact you if things take longer than we expect.”

Pidge nodded, looking resigned. They’d been upset when they found out about this trip—and that they’d missed out on arguing their way into going—but they understood what was at stake. Their mother, on the other hand…

“We won’t be able to call you?”

Matt shook his head as he reached for the strap on his bag. “The castle-ship isn’t set up to transmit with the right encryption. You’ll be able to receive our messages, but it’ll be one-way communication.”

“That’s--” She sighed, rubbing her eyes. “I don’t suppose there’s any convincing you not to go?”

“Sorry.” Matt wrapped an arm around her shoulders and kissed her cheek. “Don’t worry about me. From what I hear, New Altea is just about the safest place in the universe right now. I’ll be back before you know it.”

Karen nodded, then hurried out into the hallway. Matt watched her go, heart settling in the bottom of his gut. She always looked uneasy on the castle-ship, always in a rush to finish her business and get back to the ground—even when that business was seeing Matt off on the trip to New Altea. A low-grade headache throbbed at the base of his skull, reminding him why he needed to go, and he sighed.

“You _are_ going to ask about their computers,” Pidge said, “aren’t you? See if there are any robots or anything I can take apart?”

Matt chuckled. “I’ll steal someone’s smartphone if I have to,” he promised. “Besides, if this works out they’ll be sending some of their tech this way and you can poke your nose where it doesn’t belong to your little heart’s content.”

They smacked his arm, then hoisted his second bag—his phone, a digital camera, an e-reader stocked full of more reading material than he was likely to get through in a year, and all the other little luxuries he’d missed out on in the last year and a half. “I’m still expecting an alien smart phone for Cyber Monday.”

“I’m pretty sure Cyber Monday isn’t a gift-giving holiday.”

“Yeah, well we both owe each other a birthday or two, so I’m declaring Cyber Monday my early fifteenth.”

Matt shook his head, following Pidge out into the hall and toward the elevator. He stared long and hard at the back of their head, steeling himself, and finally forced himself to say what had been on his mind all day. “Hey, Pidge?”

“Mm?”

“You’ve hacked Galra ships from the outside before, right?”

They stopped walking, their shoulders going taut as they stared stubbornly ahead. “I have.”

Matt closed his eyes for a brief moment. So much for subtlety—though he supposed the topic would be on Pidge’s mind at least as much as on Matt’s. “Pidge, _listen_.”

“I’m not stepping down,” they cut in. “If that’s what you’re asking me to do. I’m a paladin, same as you.”

“I know you are. But you have to see where Mom’s coming from—don’t you? She’s _scared_. Last time she saw you, you were still basically a kid. Hell, in her eyes you _are_ still a kid. And maybe you can’t really be called that anymore, but that doesn’t mean that it’s okay for us to put you in danger all the time.”

“I’m in danger whether or not I’m on a Galra cruiser, Matt. You of _all_ people should know that.” They turned, eyes blazing. “What do you want from me? You want me to hide in the castle all the time? You want me to let Ryner do everything just because she’s here and we don’t need both of us to form Voltron? You know we’re stronger together.”

Matt held up his hands. “I do. And I’m not asking you to stop everything. I _won’t_ ask that, Pidge, because Mom has made plenty of arguments for why _I_ shouldn’t have to be a paladin, either.”

That put a stop to Pidge’s rising anger, and they frowned. “She has?”

“Sure.” With a lopsided grin, Matt reached down and patted his knee. He wore a compression sleeve under his jeans—more comfortable than the hinged knee brace he’d made for training as a complement to the one integrated into his paladin armor. He’d gone out with his mother to buy it after she’d seen him limping after a particularly long day without his brace. “I’m disabled, after all. Between my knee, the crystals, and the whole PTSD thing, Mom keeps saying any ethical military body would have medically discharged me by now.”

“Any _ethical_ military?” Pidge scrunched their nose up. “So she’s still harping on that, then?”

“If by _that_ you mean she can’t spend five minutes in a room with Coran without me thinking she’s going to take a swing at him, then yeah.” Matt sighed. “I mean, I get it. I _do_. We’re her kids, and she needs someone to blame for what happened.”

Pidge rolled their eyes. “She can blame _Zarkon and Haggar._ ”

“I know, Pidge. But she--” He shook his head and nudged Pidge to get them moving again, trying not to let himself think about the electrical storm brewing between Coran and Karen. “That’s a separate issue. My point is, she’s having trouble adjusting. That’s not a crime. So maybe, when it isn’t _actually_ necessary for you to be in the middle of the fighting… you could hang back? Maybe try not to give Mom a new heart attack every day?”

“How does four times a week sound?”

Matt chuckled. “Well, that’s certainly a start. Does this mean you’ll consider it?”

Pidge shrugged. They looked unhappy, but unhappy meant they weren’t simply brushing it off—which, honestly, was more than Matt had expected. He patted them on the back, then passed Pidge and hurried around the corner to the elevator, where Karen was already waiting. They went together to the Red Lion’s hangar, and Matt stored his bags under a hatch in the cockpit floor. Coran and Meri were busy securing extra bedding against the walls. The lions each had only two built-in cots (an upgrade, apparently, from the single cot they’d had before choosing more than one pilot.)

Curiously, even the Blue Lion still had only two cots, despite her now having four paladins. Maybe she expected them to sleep in shifts if the situation ever arose?

In any case, the trip to New Altea was slated to take about thirty-six hours, which meant sleeping at some point. Either Keith or Matt would always be up to fly, and one or two others would also be up to keep them company, but they were prepared for all five passengers—Thace, Allura, Coran, Meri, and Wyn—to sleep at once, just in case.

Matt emerged from the cockpit for one last goodbye and found that Keith and Thace had taken up positions on opposite sides of the hangar, Red’s bulk forming an imposing barrier between them. Matt had felt the tension the moment he stepped out of the elevator, most of it down to Red, whose tail lashed against the floor. Her head remained level as her passengers traipsed in and out of her, but there was no question: she was watching Thace. She could sense Keith’s distrust, and that made her wary.

As Matt watched, Thace turned with an arm full of pillows and started up the ramp. A low growl built in Red’s throat, giving Thace pause.

 _Red…_ Matt thought, frustrated, and Red sent back indignation.

_**We do not like him.** _

_You mean_ Keith _doesn’t like him, and_ Keith _doesn’t even really_ dislike _him. He just…_ Matt huffed. _It’s complicated._

_**Not complicated. He was not where he was needed. He was not who he should have been.** _

The thought was accompanied by a flash of pain Matt didn’t think originated in Keith and a series of confused images. Zarkon featured prominently in these images—Zarkon fighting beside Keturah, Red’s last paladin. She’d died trying to avenge Allura’s mother, who had died on Zarkon’s royal guardsman’s knife. Matt caught a flash of that last battle—Keturah and Red alone in the thick of the fighting; a flash of lasers. Then darkness, loneliness, and pain.

Red rumbled again, more subdued this time.

_**My trust is not easily won.** _

And, _vrekt_ , Matt couldn’t very well argue with that. Still, there was frost in the air when Keith finally boarded the lion, shooting Thace a single spiteful look before settling in at the controls, his back to the others, and Thace closed his eyes, looking pained.

This was going to be a long trip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A note on Major Character Death** : I try to be up-front with trigger warnings, and I know character death can be a significant one, so for anyone who's concerned you can find more about that warning [here](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/private/165983057984/tumblr_ox7tp2T7Ky1ttvln6). (No specific spoilers, but it details how many major characters die, approximately when, and how major they are. Because this series has a huge cast and I consider more than 25 characters to be "major" for the purposes of warnings--basically any protagonist who gets a POV.) If you don't want even that much of an indirect spoiler, there will also be warnings on individual chapters, as there have been throughout the series, including for character death (both major and minor.)
> 
> If after reading the note linked above you would like more details (i.e. if you want to know who specifically dies/if a particular character survives), feel free to message me (off-anon) on Tumblr [@squirenonny](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com) and I'll answer you privately. All I ask is that you not spread it around to people who may not want to be spoiled.


	2. New Altea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The paladins drove Zarkon's armies away from Earth, but that doesn't mean the Earth is safe. Lance and Hunk's families, afraid for their safety, have decided to come along--but first they need to figure out how to provide for Earth's defense. Fortunately Thace soon arrived with an invitation to come to New Altea and negotiate an alliance. After a brief discussion he headed out in the Red Lion with Matt, Keith, and the Alteans.

Thace waited until Matt was asleep before approaching Keith, because of course he did. Wasn’t like Keith could avoid him when he was the one flying. The cockpit lights were turned down low, even the neon glow muted so the others could rest. In such a small space, there was no such thing as comfort, and there was no getting away from Thace. But at least before he’d had the rest of the team to serve as a buffer.

Now it was just Keith, Coran, Wyn, and Thace, and somehow Keith didn’t think Thace would let himself be distracted any longer.

He stepped up beside Keith now, hands clasped behind his back, eyes turned out toward the stars ahead of them. They’d opened a wormhole to the edge of New Altea’s defensive zone, and everything since then had been a quiet, featureless sweep across open space. Every now and again they passed a star or a planet close enough to distinguish it from the backdrop of crystallized lights, but it wasn’t enough to dispel the tedium of the journey.

Keith was keenly aware of Thace’s proximity, even without turning to look at him. It was the way he stood ramrod-straight, making Keith uncomfortably aware of his own slouch. It was the steady breathing that didn’t quite align with his own.

It was the way Coran and Wyn’s quiet conversation had broken off. Wyn tilted his head to the side, considering Thace curiously—his eyes had gone wide when he heard Thace was from New Altea. Wyn was apparently from there as well, though he’d been Haggar’s prisoner when the paladins found him.

Coran’s expression was considerably more reserved. Not hostile, exactly, just watchful.

"You caused quite a stir in Zarkon’s army, you know,” Thace said. His voice was softer than Keith would have expected—not just quiet for the sake of letting the others rest, but… fond? It wasn’t a tone Keith had often found himself on the receiving end of, and it made something in his core twist.

“Yeah, well, I did defect,” Keith muttered. “And I wasn’t considerate enough to let them kill me for it.”

A sound almost like a laugh escaped Thace, and Keith couldn’t quite manage to stop his ears from laying back. He’d abandoned his helmet some hours ago, but he found himself wishing he’d ridden out the stuffy, sweaty discomfort. Maybe then Thace wouldn’t have gone so quiet, his gaze burning a hole in the top of Keith’s head.

Did he have to stand so close? Did he have to _stand_ at all? Keith barely came up to his chest when they stood side-by-side and now, seated at the controls, he felt even smaller—a child cowering before a giant. At least Coran had the common courtesy to sit next to Keith’s chair, cross-legged and almost absurdly prim, Wyn with a more rambling position by the wall.

“You were there.”

Keith blamed the uncomfortable silence for this outburst, cursing behind his teeth even as Thace grunted a question. No. He was _not_ having this out right now. Not where the others might overhear, not when he still had a full day trapped in this tiny cockpit with his—with _Thace._ He kept his mouth shut as the silence drew on, his nerves blazing beneath his skin as three pairs of eyes watched him.

_He was five, small and quiet and watchful, and a man he barely knew had just told them that his mother was dead, that her mercy had killed her. It was a lesson hammered into him time and again as he grew up, and the man—this man—the only man who might have told another story—said nothing to defend her._

_He was eight, fiddling with the knife the stranger had given him, and that same stranger watched from the fringes of the hangar as Keith and his father boarded the shuttle that would take them to officer’s training on the_ Reaper _. It wasn’t the first time Keith had caught the man watching him from a distance, so he knew, beyond a question, that it was the same man. The stranger turned away as Keith trailed after his father up the ramp._

 _He was fifteen, edging toward an eruption as the guilt and shame of his first kill ate away at him, and the Arena was still full of family and peers. One had already died in his Proof, his blood staining the sands a violet so deep it looked like oil, and Keith hadn’t had a choice—he hadn’t had a_ choice— _and there was a stranger standing at the back of the stadium across from him. Keith stared for a long moment, uncomprehending, and only recognized the man who had given him his mother’s knife when he turned and slipped out into the dark corridor beyond._

Keith slammed a door on the memories—memories that had been pressing at him since he’d first seen Thace’s face. With the fresh scars and the ugly torn edge to one of his ears, he was starkly changed from the man who had watched Keith his entire life. But he wasn’t so changed as to be unrecognizable.

His uncle.

His uncle had been watching him for thirteen years and only bothered to talk to him _now_ , when he had no other choice.

“I couldn’t risk someone drawing a connection between us,” Thace said, almost as though he’d read Keith’s mind. Red growled inaudibly, the sensation warming Keith’s chest, steadying him enough that he could turn and meet Thace’s eyes—if only briefly.

“You’re my uncle, apparently,” he said. “Isn’t that already a connection?”

Thace sighed. “Your mother and I worked very hard to make sure people forgot we were related. I was her commanding officer, and I helped her fake her death when her cover was blown. If anyone figured it out, you and I both would have been in danger.”

“You mean your mission would have been in danger.”

Thace started to say something, then closed his mouth. “That was one consideration, yes.”

Scoffing, Keith turned to fiddle with a screen to his right, putting Thace out of his line of sight. “And you’re here _now_ because of your mission. So let’s not waste either of our time pretending this is some big, emotional family reunion, okay?”

A heavy silence fell after that, the only sounds those of Meri’s soft snores and the omnipresent hum of the Red Lion. Wyn seemed to be trying to melt into the shadows, his gaze darting around the cockpit in search of anything beside Keith and Thace to focus on. Coran’s gaze, in contrast, remained steady, watching Keith as though to ask, _Do you need me to step in?_

Keith pretended not to have noticed.

For a long while, that was how they proceeded—Keith pretending there were things on the screens that needed his attention, Wyn wishing he were somewhere else, Thace and Coran watching Keith from either side, their gazes pinning him between them like a specimen on display.

Eventually, Thace broke the silence. “We aren’t very much alike, are we?”

“The paladin who stands up for what’s right and the coward who just keeps running away?” Keith asked, feigning shock. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Coran’s lips turned downward, but he didn’t say anything, which was probably for the best. Keith didn’t need to pick a fight with anyone else today.

“You are… direct,” Thace went on, unperturbed. “To-the-point. You are the sort of person to fight on the front lines. Your mother and I have been spies too long. We live in the shadows, we work behind the scenes. And I suppose, sometimes, we let relationships fall by the wayside.”

Keith stood abruptly, sending a wordless plea to Red, who responded with a reassuring rumble. “Sorry,” he said, stalking toward the hatch at the back of the cockpit that led to the maintenance space at the heart of his lion. “I need to check on something.”

Thace turned, his gaze sitting like a weight on Keith’s shoulders until the hatch closed between them.

Keith made it to the bottom of the first ladder before the throbbing knot of emotions in his chest unraveled. He sat down, pressing his forehead to the tops of his knees, and laced his fingers together on the back of his head. Curled up like that, his chest, legs, and elbows forming a cage around him, his lion wrapped around that, he released a long, shaking breath.

 _Now who’s the one running?_ he asked himself, anger chasing away the dull ache in his chest. _What are you going to do, hide here the rest of the way to New Altea?_

It was a tempting thought. Red could pilot herself well enough out here in the middle of nowhere, even take on any minor threat they might encounter, and Matt would be awake again in a couple hours. Keith didn’t really _need_ to be in the cockpit.

He wouldn’t delude himself into thinking anyone had actually believed his shitty excuse for running away. Coran and Wyn knew Keith was no mechanic, and Red wasn’t in any obvious distress.

No, they knew he’d run, and whenever he went back in there, he’d have to face their judgment. But that might actually be better than sitting here with his own thoughts—thoughts about family and about himself, thoughts he refused to acknowledge. He’d never been one for self-pity, and he wasn’t about to change his habits now, just because Thace decided to show his face.

He just… needed a moment to steady himself, before he started shouting and woke everyone up. That was all. Just a few minutes to cool down, and he’d be ready to see this through.

It was an hour before he managed to drag himself back up the ladder, and he tried not to think too long on the looks Thace and Coran gave him when he arrived.

* * *

The Red Lion had been gone for thirty-eight hours when the next attack came. Not that Lance was counting. (It was _Nyma_ who was counting, actually, and it was Nyma who pointed out that the others would be on New Altea by now—three hours ago, the castle may have been able to force through an emergency call for backup, _maybe,_  but now they would surely be caught up in New Altea’s block on unsecured transmissions, and wasn’t that just a little _too_ convenient?)

“You’re being paranoid,” Lance told her—again—as he took them into battle. “The attacks were already coming every day or two.”

“I’m just saying—fighter above you—it’s suspicious.”

Lance shot a glare over his shoulder at Nyma, even as he took aim through Blue’s eyes and shot the fighter out of the sky. “There’s no spy on the castle-ship,” he said, “and I know what I’m doing, thank you very much.”

Val sighed. “She’s not saying you’re a bad pilot, Lance. It’s just kinda stressful having to stand here with nothing to do.”

Irritation still nipped at the corners of Lance’s mind, but he forced himself to breathe through it, looping around toward the Yellow Lion and picking off a few of the ships hounding her. This fight was no different from the last several—a small squadron of fighters, mostly piloted by sentries, buzzing around like mosquitoes and trying to break through to the surface. The paladins had to stay on their toes, especially without Red here to zip off after any particularly slippery ships, but they’d been doing all right so far. Better than all right in Yellow's case. Hunk and Shay were beasts, taking full advantage of their lion's thick armor to dive right into the heat of battle. Lance wondered how much of that was down to Hunk's replenished supply of Ativan. He might have taken one before the battle--he'd told Lance he was considering making a habit of it--but he'd also said that just _having_ it there as a safeguard made everything less terrifying.

Less all right was the state of Blue’s cockpit. None of them had managed to sync yet, unlocking whatever boost Blue had in store for them—she remained tight-lipped (telepathically speaking) on the subject, despite Lance’s wheedling efforts to tease it out of her. Mostly the lack of synchronicity was down to the chaos of the massive battle that had greeted them upon their return to Earth and the fact that Lance, Val, and Meri had largely spent the intervening week and change on the ground.

But Shiro wanted them to get used to working together, and these piddling little battles were as good a training ground as any. Except that none of the others had managed to sync with their co-paladins until the situation was headed for disaster, and in the mean time Lance had to deal with a couple of backseat paladins critiquing him on his flying, his shooting, his focus, and everything in between.

“Watch out!” Nyma cried, cursing under her breath. “You almost hit that ship!”

Okay, so it was Nyma handing out complaints. Val, being caught between her cousin and her girlfriend, was trying to play peacemaker and mostly just offending both of them a little more.

“I was nowhere _near_ that ship,” Lance shot back, ignoring Blue’s amused voice in his head. “If my flying scares you that much, then maybe you should close your eyes.”

“If you’re going to kill us all, I’d rather have time to prepare.”

Lance wrinkled his nose, swinging Blue’s tail around and letting them glide in an arc around a cluster of fighters. The maneuver caught the ships between Lance and Shiro, and their tandem assault reduced the ships to bits of glowing scrap metal in seconds. Then even those lights went out, and Lance turned in search of his next target.

It was Pidge’s soft, emphatic curse that alerted him to the new arrival: a warship—smaller than Zarkon’s  dreadnaught, but still nothing to sneeze at. The wormhole glowed violet as the ship emerged, fresh fighters already streaking out of the hangars lining its belly.

“We’re all right,” Shiro said evenly, slicing another dozen ships in half on his way to meet the new force. “We can take this. Anamuri--”

“I see it.” Anamuri’s voice always reminded Lance of sandpaper and laundry fresh out of the dryer—warm, but scratchy—and it was laced now with fatigue. She was the commander of the rebel forces that had come to Earth’s aid, and she’d been coordinating with Coran to deal with Galra attacks. From the sound of it, she hadn’t been getting much rest these last few days. “Hold them off. We’ll clean up the rest of this first force, then join you.”

“Copy that,” Shiro grunted. “And keep an eye on the scanners in case anyone else decides to show up. Akira, looks like we might need your team after all.”

“Already on our way,” Akira said.

Shiro nodded. “Paladins, with me. Let’s be quick about this.”

Nyma hummed a tune that was altogether too bright and cheery for the middle of battle as Lance took off after Shiro. “Still think this is just the same old same old?” she asked.

Lance didn’t dignify her with a response.

* * *

The last three hours of the journey to New Altea were torture. Despite a lifetime spent learning to be poised and in control at all times, Allura kept having to remind herself that a princess didn’t press her nose up against the viewscreen and ask every five minutes if they were there yet.

Matt and Keith were both piloting now—less, Allura thought, because they felt the need for the extra speed, and more as a way to have a private conversation. Allura could see Matt’s face from where she sat beside Meri on one of the cots, and she recognized the faraway look in his eye. He was fully immersed in the bond right now, which meant he and Keith were of one mind, thoughts laid bare.

She was glad for it. Keith had been on edge ever since she woke up, and though he’d laid down like the others when Allura, Meri, and Matt took the second shift, he’d tossed and turned for the first hour before huffing and finally going still. She wasn’t sure if he’d ever fallen asleep, or if he’d just stared at the ceiling and brooded until the cockpit lights brightened for the last leg of the trip.

Allura could understand his unease; it couldn’t be easy to find out your own mother and uncle had been fighting the very Empire that raised you—especially as Keith had thought his mother dead for two-thirds of his life.

She could understand, but at the moment she was having trouble sympathizing, which was why it was for the best that Matt had taken on that role. All Allura could think about was the planet awaiting her—a world full of her own people, a world where her culture had lived on, had _flourished_ for ten thousand years, largely untouched by war. It was everything she’d been too afraid to admit she dreamed of, and the closer they got, the stronger the pull of it became. It was like a million minuscule threads had been tied around her nerves and kept tugging her forward, their pull remaining just shy of painful even as it made her want to crawl out of her skin.

She was almost home.

“You doing okay?” Meri whispered, catching Allura’s hand between her own. Her skin was cool, her fingers trembling as they held Allura, and her smile belied the same restless anticipation eating Allura from the inside.

“Nervous,” Allura admitted. She kept her voice low, though Matt and Keith were too caught up in their own private conversation to listen to her and everyone else besides Thace was in the same position as Allura. “You?”

Meri shrugged. “It doesn’t feel real. I spent—hell, if you add it all up, I probably spent close to fifteen years awake on Earth. I stopped hoping for this a long time ago. I made my peace with what happened.”

One look at her—eyes glistening with unshed tears, foot tapping against the floor, open longing in the tug of her lips—told Allura that whatever Meri had found on Earth, it wasn’t peace. Not fully. How could she have? Even her closest friends hadn’t known a fraction of her story. She hadn’t talked about what happened except maybe with Blue. She hadn’t faced any tangible reminders of the war until very recently… She hadn’t healed so much as learned not to think about her grief.

And _that_ was something Allura could sympathize with.

Allura sighed and leaned her head on Meri’s shoulder. “Have you talked to Rosario yet?”

“Uh...”

“I’ll take that as a no.” Allura tipped her head back, a frown pulling at her lips. “I thought you wanted to clear the air. Tell her your full story, apologize for keeping quiet, all that.”

Meri bit her lip. “I do. It’s just… What if she hates me?”

“She’s your best friend.”

“She’s _Lena’s_ best friend. She barely knows _me_.”

Allura wasn’t in the mood for a fight, so she let the matter drop, squeezing Meri’s hand reassuringly. “Well, those of us who _do_ know you know that you did the only thing you could.” She hesitated, eyes darting to the narrow strip of viewscreen visible around Thace’s back. “How much longer do you suppose it’ll be?”

Matt blinked a few times, his gaze slow to focus. Even after it did, it seemed to take a moment for his mind to catch up with his ears, but then he smiled at Allura. “It should be coming into view any second now.”

“Really?” Allura was on her feet before she could think better of it, earning a chuckle from Meri and a knowing smile from Coran. Thace just eyed her stoically, and she forced herself to meet his gaze as she glided forward to join Coran. Her royal training had to be good for something, damn it.

A few breathless moments passed, Allura clutching at Coran’s elbow with one hand, the other still clasped in Meri’s. Wyn pressed forward, bouncing on his toes. With his hair beginning to grow out in tight, dark curls that masked the glossy scars criss-crossing his scalp, with the grin that split his face and the light in his amber eyes—as bright as his golden _glaes_ against his deep brown skin—he looked more like the child he was then at any point since the paladins had rescued him.

He turned back to the viewscreen, stilled, then flung out a hand, his finger butting up against the screen. “There it is!” he cried.

Allura leaned to the side, trying to see around Wyn, but she needn’t have bothered. The Red Lion’s speed was easy to forget when they were hurling through open space, but here, with a star dead ahead of them and growing rapidly closer, it was more obvious. The star Wyn had pointed to—still just a pinprick like any other—drifted a bit, shifting relative to the stars around it. Then it began to grow, its light intensifying.

Red darkened her viewscreen, filtering out the light of the star, but it still stung Allura’s eyes. (The light—the light was the reason for the pair of tears that slid down her cheeks. Not homesickness for a place she'd never even seen.)

Then they spotted the planets—a gas giant visible at the edge of the viewscreen for just an instant as a blur of orange and brown; a planet wreathed in silver clouds.

And New Altea itself.

They slowed as they approached, the planet swelling to fill Allura’s field of vision. Emerald tones painted the side of the planet lit by the sun, and blue lights sprinkled the night, clustered together in cities so large they should have been impossible.

And the architecture—Already she could see the great Planetary Rings, so like the Rings of the world she remembered. They were simpler in design than what Altea had had, but they shone silver and gold in the sunlight, wrapping the world up in a lattice of metal. Those rings would be the primary line of defense, though she couldn’t begin to guess how the specifics compared to home. Altea of old had boasted two separate systems of defensive lasers, a particle barrier and a shield cast out of Quintessence itself, a communications ring, and a navigational ring to aid Altean ships all across the universe. One of these new rings, she imagined, must also control the invisible field that diverted wormholes away from the defensive zone.

Thace stepped forward, and Keith grudgingly gave him access to the comms screen so he could transmit the clearance codes that would grant them leave to enter the atmosphere. He’d insisted on keeping these codes to himself, as he’d refused to share the coordinates of New Altea. He clearly didn’t appreciate the Red Lion’s sentience or her bond with her paladins, for if Matt and Keith didn’t already know both the coordinates and security codes, Allura would eat her slipper.

A confirmation message arrived after a brief moment, and a marker appeared on the viewscreen, showing them the airfield where they’d been given clearance to land.

They passed over the city too quickly for Allura’s liking. Skyscrapers and parks and city streets flashed by beneath them, sparkling like a Balmera crystal in the midmorning sun. Allura imagined some of the people they passed stopped and craned their necks to follow Red’s path across the sky, but they were too high up and the people gone too quickly for her to be sure.

Keith and Matt lingered in their seats for a moment after they set down, but Allura crossed to the door as quickly as decorum allowed, towing Meri and Coran behind her. Thace was nevertheless the first to the ramp, moving with understated speed. He didn’t walk so much as prowl, his gait fluid, his long strides carrying him half again as far as each of Allura’s.

A small delegation was waiting for them at the edge of the airfield: two Alteans and a Galra. Their clothing was in a style Allura didn’t immediately recognize, but as she approached, she began to pick out some old Altean influences—the outfits were all of a single piece, with sleek lines and trimmed in silver or gold. There seemed to be some Galra influence, as well, in the deep maroon panels on the Altean woman’s dress, the enveloping coat the Galra woman wore, and the other Altean’s high collar.

Upon closer inspection, the woman in the red dress appeared to actually be of mixed descent—a faint lavender cast to her fair skin and yellow sclera speaking to Galra blood. She curtsied while the other two gave shallow bows.

“Princess Allura,” said the Galra woman, inclining her head a second time. She looked up and quickly away, her hands clasped before her. “Is it really you?”

“We have heard stories,” added the other woman. She smoothed her skirt—clearly a nervous habit, and Allura found herself adopting a placating smile without conscious thought. The woman gave a start, then returned the smile, gaining confidence as she continued. “The Lost Princess—her Guardian—” Her eyes darted to Coran, who blinked, tucking his hands behind his back. The woman’s voice shook with a nervous laugh. “I’ll admit, I never expected to meet you in my lifetime.”

“I didn’t believe the stories were even true.” The Altean in the center jumped as the Galra woman palmed her forehead. “Ah… sorry. It’s just a bit like meeting someone out of the old myths.”

Allura clasped her hands at her waist. “It’s quite all right. I can’t imagine I’d be any less surprised if Myvara the Great or Vera the Wise were to one day appear on my doorstep.” She laughed, somewhat self-consciously, as the welcoming committee all gave her blank stares. “Ah… I suppose the legends may have changed somewhat in the last ten thousand years?”

Meri inched closer to her, fingers trailing along the small of Allura’s back, just above the waist of her dress—not the most formal dress she owned, but the best she could tolerate for thirty-six hours of travel.

“Yes,” Allura said. “I believe introductions are in order? I am Allura, daughter of King Alfor and one of the pilots of the Black Lion. This is Coran, my adviser and the commander of the Castle of Lions--” He shot her a mildly irritated look at the title, which he’d been fighting for some time now, and she suppressed the urge to wiggle her ears at him. “--Meri, one of our Blue Paladins.” She turned back toward Keith and Matt, who lingered at the back of the group. “And our Red Paladins, Keith and Matt. And of course--”

“Wyn!” The Galra woman’s hands flew to her mouth as Wyn wriggled through the space between Allura and Coran, beamed, and flung himself at the stranger. She caught him in an embrace and spun him around, bowing her head to nuzzle against his hair, whispering words too low for Allura to hear.

The other woman watched for a moment, seemingly stunned, then visibly gathered herself and cleared her throat. “Give them a moment, your Highness. That’s our Mistress of Aviation, Jana. She trained under the boy’s parents some years ago now. As I understand it, she practically grew up with him.”

“She was devastated when we lost contact with his family’s ship,” the Altean added.

 _His family’s ship?_ Allura tried not to let her horror show on her face. Wyn had been very tight-lipped about the circumstances of his capture. Perhaps Coran or Lance had heard the details, but Allura certainly had not. Perhaps it was foolish of her, but she’d been hoping to reunite him with his parents now that they’d returned him home.

Her smile felt forced, but she nodded as graciously as she could manage. “Of course. May I ask your names?”

The woman let out a high-pitched _eep!_ of alarm, clapping one hand over her mouth. “O-oh! Yes, of course, your Highness! Forgive me! I’m just so—Tala. My name is Tala.” She spread her skirt and dropped into a low curtsy that seemed more than merely rusty. Allura suspected such displays were out of vogue here on New Altea—in fact, they had already been heading that way ten thousand years ago. It was entirely possible Tala had never curtsied until she’d heard the Lost Princess was coming.

“It’s wonderful to meet you, Tala. Are you also in aviation?”

“Oh, ah, no. I’m—ah—sorry.” She straightened, breathing deeply, and curtsied again. “I’m chief assistant to the First Seat.”

Meri tilted her head to the side. “First… Seat? What’s that?”

“Chairperson of the Planetary Senate, Lady Paladin,” the Altean said with considerably more poise than Tala possessed. “And the head of the High Council. I suppose you could say he’s kind of like our king.”

“Not that he _is_ the King, of course!” Tala waved her hands frantically, sidling in front of the Altean. “We haven’t had a royal line since you—well, since you entered stasis, I suppose. It wouldn’t be right to replace you. Besides, he shares power with the other Seats, so he's not exactly a _monarch._ ”

“Don’t tell him that.”

“ _Yvis!_ ” Tala hissed. “You’re speaking to the _Princess!_ ”

Somewhere behind Allura, Matt whispered something that made Keith snort. Allura sighed, but went on smiling. She’d forgotten how exhausting it was to be a princess. “It’s quite all right, Tala. I may be the Princess of Altea, but I am ten thousand years out of my depth. I do believe a bit of education is called for.”

Tala gaped at her, then stepped back, nodding. “I… I suppose that _is_ what ze’s here for… Yvis is a scholar, your Highness. A member of our Culture Council—our Keeper of History, to be exact. Ze knows more about Old Altea than just about anyone, if I’m being honest. But I’m afraid hir tact is a bit lacking.”

Allura hesitated for a moment, caught off-guard by Yvis’s pronouns. Not the _fact_ of hir pronouns—Altea had long recognized gender as a spectrum, with a number of common pronouns—but _ze_ was not a variation Allura was familiar with. _He, she,_ and _ey_ were the most common, and more generally a singular _they_ , as Pidge employed. There had been others, but so far as Allura remembered _ze_ was not one of them.

She wondered whether this was a simple evolution of language—it sounded a bit like a combination of the Altean _ey_ with the Galran _xe—_ or if her people’s understanding of gender itself had changed without her.

Feeling a bit like the currents of time had just swept her feet out from under her, Allura gestured for Yvis and Tala to take the lead. Tala did so with visible relief, though she tensed each time she had to remind Yvis of how to properly address the Princess. Yvis, thankfully, ignored Tala, giving Allura a brief rundown of the state of New Altea and what she could expect from her upcoming meeting with the High Council.

“The council’s made up of six seats—Defense, Intelligence, Culture, Education, Economics, and Justice. The original Charter says there should be three Galra and three Alteans on the council at all times, but that’s gotten a little… messy.”

Coran raised his eyebrow. “I take it it’s quite common for Galra and Alteans to intermarry?”

Yvis shrugged. “I guess so. In the cities, at least. Get out into the country and there are still insular communities—a lot of the original Alteans, they weren’t so keen on sharing a street with the people that slaughtered their friends, you see? So they formed their own towns, and some of them are still out there, still all pure and junk. Quiz’k, New Phyrri’s got almost a hundred thousand Alteans living there, and only about a thousand Galra.

“And that’s not to mention the Galra who’ve found refuge here in recent decaphoebes. The ones that fled the Empire? Big cities like New Alafor here are just about the only places they _can_ live, and even then they’re treated with suspicion. If you’re not _sothra_ , then you’re the enemy and all that rubbish.”

“Sorry,” Matt said, sidling forward. “ _Sothra?_ That’s not translating for me.” He glanced at Allura and Meri, who shook their heads. “What is it?”

“ _Sothra_ ,” Yvis said, blinking owlishly. Ze cocked hir head to the side. “Ah, but you would take the Old Altean, wouldn’t you? Ah…”

“The True Galra,” Thace said, his voice soft. Allura turned to find him staring straight ahead, seemingly unconcerned with the conversation happening ahead of him, or with Wyn’s chatter to Jana behind. “Galra who were born on New Altea. Or, if you want to be pedantic about it, the descendants of the first Galra to come here, the ones who defied Zarkon from the start and, rather than hunt down the survivors of Altea’s destruction, offered protection and aid.”

Yvis nodded sharply. “Yes,” ze said. “That. It's... It's not _such_ a big distinction, but there are places... Well, in certain circles, _sothra_  are more easily trusted by their neighbors, while the _asothra_ often have a more difficult time. Most of them live in the city or join the Intelligence Division, but there are a few small _asothra_ communities in the north.”

Yvis kept talking, but Tala’s eyes had drifted to Thace, whose mouth tightened almost imperceptibly. She frowned, then glanced to Keith—and suddenly Thace’s lip curled back, his gait shifting subtly so he edged into Tala’s line of sight. Keith looked up at the back of Thace’s head, brow furrowed.

The staring contest between Thace and Tala continued for a painfully long moment, and then Tala clapped her hands and spun around, waving them toward a building on their right. Where most of the city—New Alafor, a name that stung a little more each time Allura heard it—was made of familiar crisp lines and tapered towers, all made of the gleaming white metal, the Council Hall had an Old Galran aesthetic. It might have been carved out of the planet itself, rocky spires and veins of ore splitting the pavement underfoot. It had something of a haphazard feel to it, and even Allura, who had been to the planet Daibazaal before Zarkon’s rise to power, couldn’t tell if it had been built or merely shaped from a geographic formation that had been present at the site of the city when it was founded.

“Here we are!” Tala called out in a sing-song, picking up her skirts as she scaled the ridged stone slope up to the gilded doors. The ridges might almost be called steps—but it seemed some concessions had been made to Altean sensibilities, including a ramp carved into the far side of the slope, providing easier access to those with limited mobility. “I’ll take you as far as the council chamber, and Yvis...” Tala shuddered, then smiled brighter. “Yvis will stay with you as long as you need hir services. Jana--”

“Jana’s taking me out for some nunvill!” Wyn said, hopping up onto a stone outcropping and flinging his arms wide for balance. He paused, turning to Coran. “If that’s okay?”

Jana reached out to steady him, a fond look in her eyes. “It won’t be nunville,” she said, “and we’ll come find you after the day’s meetings are over. No point in making him sit through the politics, is there?”

The rigid set of Coran’s shoulders eased. “Of course,” he said. “Have fun!”

Allura smiled, elbowing Coran in the side. “Getting attached, are we?”

“Well, ah...” Coran cleared his throat, flushing crimson. “The boy _is_ quite charming.”

Allura chuckled and, turning, caught sight of Keith, who had edged up beside Thace, his arms crossed over his chest. “So...” Keith glanced up, then back down at his feet. He drummed his fingertips on his arm, pursing his lips while Thace watched him quietly. “What’s _asothra?_ ”

Thace closed his eyes briefly and Keith, whose head was still bowed, didn’t see the ache that crossed his uncle’s face. “The opposite of _sothra_. Untrue Galra, you might say. Or at least Untested. People who were not born on New Altea. Who only defected later in life. People like us.”

“And they’re… what? Second class citizens?”

“Not officially,” Thace said, a hint of a growl entering his voice. “But it’s no surprise so many _asothra_ join the military or agree to spy for the Council. There are no legal sanctions against us, but there are… challenges.”

Keith hummed discontentedly. “So the Alteans hate us.”

“Not the Alteans.” Thace paused. “Not _just_ the Alteans. Much of the strongest distrust comes from the _sothra_.”

“Why?” Matt shouldered his way between Keith and Thace, his eyes darting back to the city streets as they entered the Council Hall. He caught Allura watching and cleared his throat. “Because their _parents_ were good, loyal people? Isn’t it _more_ honorable to have made the choice for yourself?”

The faintest smile graced Thace’s lips. “You speak more sense than a great many scholars I have known. But—it’s a complicated issue. One best discussed when we have the time to consider all sides of the matter.” He nodded toward one particularly sour-looking Galra who stood at attention at the center of the entrance hall. He wore thin blue-black armor under a black and red coat, a long braid looped around his throat like a necklace. There were red markings on his face, though Allura couldn’t say with any certainty if they were a mark of Altean blood or a quirk of genetics—or if they’d been painted on.

“Who’s that?” Matt whispered.

“Kolivan. Commander of our armed forces. He occupies the Defense Seat on the Council.”

“He’s _sothra,_ then?” Keith asked.

Allura had just a moment to watch the warning flicker across Thace’s face, and the frustration across Keith’s, before Tala was introducing her to Kolivan, who bowed his head in greeting. Allura returned the gesture, trying not to let it show that she was intimidated. Kolivan had another handspan of height on Thace, making Allura feel like a child again, and it was a challenge to meet those hard yellow eyes.

Kolivan’s head turned slightly to the side, toward Thace, Keith, and Matt. “And who is _that_?”

Keith clenched his jaw, wrenching away from Thace’s outstretched hand as he stalked forward, only stopping when he was toe to toe with Kolivan. Both were Galra, but Keith was only as tall as Allura. He had to crane his head back to meet Kolivan’s eyes, but he managed to make it look like a face-off between equals.

“I’m Keith,” he said. “The Red Paladin of Voltron. You got a problem?”

Kolivan blinked, his arms uncrossing. He looked over Keith’s head at Thace. “Keith? Keena’s son?”

Thace rubbed the bridge of his nose, nodding. “The one and only.”

“Hey!” Keith snapped. “I can _hear_ you.”

Kolivan glanced at him, then sighed and took a step back, cleanly disengaging with Keith and falling back to attention. “She’s in her office. You’ll want to go see her immediately. Princess, if the rest of you will follow me?”

Matt grabbed Keith by the arm before he could go, and Allura heard him whisper, “Are you going to be okay?”

“Fine,” Keith muttered.

Then he and Thace were gone, through the nondescript door across the hall and up the stairs beyond. Allura watched the door swing shut before composing herself for negotiations and following Kolivan into the Council Hall.

* * *

“Okay, how many fighters does this ship _have_?”

Nyma grabbed onto the back of Lance’s seat as he veered aside, narrowly avoiding a hail of laserfire from the latest wave of attackers. No other warships had followed the new arrival into Earth’s airspace, but that one must have been packed bow to stern with fighters. There seemed to be more of them now than there had been in the thick of the battle last week.

Or maybe it was just that Nyma had the time to watch the entirety of this battle—Yellow and Green Lions providing cover for Akira’s squad in their fragile little fighters, Shiro hammering at the warship, disabling hangar bay doors in an attempt to stop more reinforcements from joining the fray, Anamuri’s forces bleeding in at the edges, picking ships off one and two at a time. The castle-ship and the warship traded blows, both shields flashing red. Without Coran there to pilot the castle-ship away from enemy fire, they were in a desperate race to destroy or disable the warship before the castle’s shields fell.

Lance veered back the other direction, and Val squeaked as she latched onto Nyma, her fingers scrabbling for purchase on Nyma’s armor. If it felt strange to be wearing paladin armor (and it still did), it was even more surreal to see it on Val, with her scarred face and the amateur haircut Nyma had given her after the jailbreak. She looked…

She looked like a warrior, honestly, and while Nyma knew better than most how fiercely Val chased her goals, she didn’t have the disposition to be a soldier. She wasn’t that hardened yet—and Nyma hoped she would never reach that point.

Another too-sharp turn, and Nyma couldn’t hold it in any longer. “What are you _doing?_ ” she snarled, widening her stance to try to keep her balance.

Val, though, only laughed—one hand on Lance’s chair, one on Nyma’s arm, her helmet askew from bashing her face against the headrest, and she was _laughing._ “Just like Podracing, isn’t it?”

Lance laughed once, surprised and delighted, before he bit his tongue and pulled them around again, releasing a stream of ice that opened up just enough room for them to steady out and Val and Nyma to regain their footing. “Like Podracing with more lasers,” he said. “Which makes this the ultimate training for N64 games, obviously. How much you wanna bet I break all our old high scores first try next time we dust that old thing off?”

“I’ve already got your trophy on order,” Val said dryly.

Lance shot a look over his shoulder, then raised one hand behind him, palm up. Val slapped her own hand against it, and Nyma just stared at them, bewildered. “What the hells are you talking about?”

“Star Wars!” they said in unison. Val added a sweeping gesture that encompassed the viewscreen and the chaos beyond.

Nyma ran a hand down her face. “Remind me why we’re together again?”

“Because you think I’m cute and I can make you smile even when you don't want to?” Val twisted around, wedging herself between Nyma and the back of Lance’s seat. She looped her arms around Nyma’s neck and batted her eyes.

“Right.” Nyma rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t actually keep herself from smiling, and Val triumphantly kissed the corner of her mouth. “You’re hopeless.”

Val beamed. “Runs in the family. Lance! This thing got any nitro boosters or some shit?”

They broke away, and as Val turned to lean over Lance’s shoulder, the whole cockpit seemed to _shift_. A gust of wind whipped past Nyma, Val yelped, and suddenly she was sprawled sideways in a second chair, which pulled up to Lance’s right. The instrument panel and display screens widened, stretching out in front of Val and giving her access to Blue’s systems.

Nyma’s heart clenched, her lungs suddenly forgetting how to breathe as Lance let out a wordless cry of elation, grabbed Val’s bicep, and shook her.

She rolled with the movement, one hand pressed to her head, a dopey smile on her face. “Well that was unexpected. Is this--?”

“Yep.” Lance turned his attention back to the battle, swerving between explosions as he picked off fighters one at a time. “Can you--?”

“Oh, yeah.” Val straightened up, hesitated a moment, then reached for the controls before her. She said nothing, but Lance nodded as if she had. When Val squeezed the trigger, a laser streaked out ahead of them—not the main laser, mounted in Blue’s mouth, or the one on the tip of her tail. It looked like it had come from her right shoulder.

Nyma swallowed a mouthful of bile as Blue dove into the battle with renewed vigor. “Somebody want to clue me in here?”

“I--” Val opened fire again, whooped in delight, then turned, beaming, toward Nyma. “I think we might have—”

“Synced up,” Lance finished. He laughed. “Yup. Well.” He tilted his head to the side as they swung around. “I don’t think we’re all the way synced? It feels like something's  missing. I think--”

“It’ll take all four of us,” Val said. “I think so too.”

Both of them sucked in a sudden sharp breath, and Lance wrenched the controls, bracing himself with his feet. Nyma fell against his seat, the air rushing out of her lungs as she folded over the headrest. “Thanks,” Lance called.

Nyma wheezed in a breath. “Thanks _who?_ And for what, giving me whiplash?”

“Val spotted some fighters sneaking up on us,” Lance said, as if that explained anything.

Nyma looked at Val.

“Telepathy?” she offered weakly. “Kinda?”

Oh. “Right. Super special paladin bond thing.” Nyma heard the bitterness in her voice and winced, but neither Mendoza seemed to have noticed. For all Lance said their bond was incomplete, they seemed to Nyma to be in perfect sync, Lance twisting just right for Val to line up her shots, Val grunting out warnings that Lance heeded without hesitation.

And why shouldn’t they fall into this so naturally? They were cousins. They’d grown up together. Lance was closer in age to Val than either of his siblings, and from what Val had told Nyma, they’d always gotten along. Of _course_ they’d be the first to sync up. They’d probably fold Meri in soon enough—she’d helped raise Lance for fuck’s sake. And of course she was Altean, so she was more sister than second mother at this point.

What was Nyma to them, really? She’d known Val a couple weeks. Lance had moved past Nyma’s attempt to steal his lion surprisingly quickly, but she wouldn’t exactly call them friends. And she’d hardly exchanged two words with Meri.

 _It’s going to take time,_ she told herself. _How long did Rolo have to act like a decent freaking person before you stopped looking for the fault in his act?_

It was the same here. More time—that’s all she needed. Time to get to know the other Blues. Time to settle in. Lance, Val, and Meri had years of history that Nyma couldn’t share. It was nothing personal.

That didn’t stop it stinging.

* * *

Keith’s heart was pounding.

He cursed whatever vrekking bundle of nerves this was and tried to force the uncomfortable sensation away. What did he have to be scared of? No—not scared. Nervous, maybe?

Not even that. It was his _mother._  Okay, so he’d thought she was dead for more than twelve years and it turned out she’d just faked her death and returned to possibly the only planet in the universe that was actually, genuinely safe, leaving him behind with his asshole father and an Empire set on turning him into a monster, but it wasn’t like he was meeting an _enemy_. He wasn’t walking into a _battle._

He was coming home. Or… so he tried to tell himself.

(It didn’t feel very much like a homecoming.)

Thace was silent the whole way up to the thick, sturdy door on the third floor that apparently marked his mother’s office. She was just on the other side. His mother. The rebel, the spy, the one who spit in Zarkon’s eye with an act of mercy and lived to do it again. He barely knew anything about her—but wasn’t that enough? She was a hero. She was someone he could be proud to call family.

She was someone he didn’t think he wanted to see. Not yet. Not like this. It had all happened so fast, and now that he was here he wanted nothing more than to be down with his friends meeting stuffy politicians purely because that would have meant he could put this off a little longer.

Thace knocked on the door, and it opened before Keith had a chance to act on his second thoughts. Thace nudged him forward, and Keith stumbled into a small, tidy office. There was a window, but it was tinted foggy gray, giving the room a gloomy cast despite the bright overhead lighting. Aside from the datapad on the desk, there was nothing of note in the room—a virtual map on the wall with no markers, a pair of chairs set facing the desk, a deep crimson carpet on the floor.

And Keith’s mother, standing beside the desk, her eyes riveted to Keith.

She was smaller than he remembered her being—a comfortable midpoint between Keith’s height and Thace’s. Small for a Galra, but powerfully built. Keith supposed he’d gotten her stature and Thace’s slender build, and then he’d taken them both to an extreme, until he looked nothing like a Galra ought to except for the purple fur and glowing yellow eyes.

“Keith.” Keena smiled, her ears drooping. “You made it.”

Even her hair was odd—dyed deep mahogany, close-cropped most of the way around except for a wedge along the right side of her head where the hair grew longer, curling around her chin. It made her look younger, eased the wrinkles around her eyes, muted the grays flecking her fur.

Keith stood, uncertain, just inside the door as Thace came in and shut them off from the rest of the world, then took up post in the corner, where he could watch both the door and the window. Then it was just Keith and the family he’d never known and a million questions he couldn’t put into words. (That wasn’t quite right. He could put it into words. He could put it into a single word: _Why?_ )

“Oh!” Keena jumped, spinning back toward her desk. She opened one of the drawers, pushed aside some memory sticks and nondescript black boxes, and pulled out an intricately carved silver hilt. Keith recognized the activator switch and blade mounting of an energy sword, not unlike the one he’d inherited from his father and had lost in the battle for Earth.

Keena held it out toward him, smiling placidly.

“What is this?” Keith asked, staring at the blade. All he could think of was being fifteen again, standing in the prep room just off the Arena where he would either die or kill another sentient being, and his father standing behind him, pressing on him a weapon worthy of a true Galra.

This should have felt different—his mother was _different—_ but instead it felt almost exactly like before.

“A sword,” Keena said. “For you. I heard you’re looking for a new one.”

Keith looked up, startled. “You heard?”

Keena smiled, a predatory smile. A Galra smile. “I’m the Spymaster for New Altea, Keithka. It’s my job to know things.”

 _Keithka._ The childish nickname grated at him, a pressing reminder of just how long it had been since he’d last seen his mother. Did she still see a child when she looked at him? (Did he _want her_ to see a child?)

She was still holding the sword hilt out to him, and he took it reluctantly, turning it over in his hand. It was finely wrought, old Galran glyphs etched into the guard. He almost asked her what they meant, then thought better of it.

“So…” He dropped his hands to his side and tapped his sword hilt against his thigh. It gave a satisfying _click_ each time it met his armor, and he felt his tumultuous insides begin to settle. “What now?”

Keena smiled wider. “I’m so glad you asked.”

She sat, resting her elbows on her desk, and folded her hands beneath her chin. Her claws, Keith realized, were painted crimson. She was quiet for a long moment, but she didn’t speak until Keith lifted his gaze to hers—and nearly flinched away from the intensity in her eyes.

“Keithka… My son…” She paused, her ears quivering with anticipation. “I have a mission for you.”

* * *

The initial meeting with the council was mercifully short—for Meri, at least. Allura and Coran were still sequestered away with Yvis and five of the six Council Seats, talking politics and laying the groundwork for the treaty. The actual negotiations wouldn’t happen until tomorrow, when Keena (Seat of Intelligence and also, apparently, Keith’s mother) was able to attend.

After about twenty minutes of introductions, posturing, and empty niceties, the Council had invited Meri and Matt to leave. Meri knew she should be offended at being summarily excluded from the Council session, but mostly she was just glad to get out of there. Politics had never been her scene, and a decade babysitting Lance and his siblings hadn’t improved her liking for practiced smiles that hid grimy machinations.

Tala showed them to the rooms that had been reserved for them—an entire wing of a guest residence near Council Hall. Even here there were echoes of the Altea Meri remembered, altered just enough to grate. The clean lines of the building bore too many flourishes; the garden underneath her balcony was too sparse and orderly; and in the sky overhead, a too-large moon peeked out between two Rings that occupied the wrong section of the sky.

She’d been standing on the balcony, chest aching at the sights stretching out before her, for half an hour when Matt knocked on her door. “Jana had to get back to work, but Wyn’s going to show me around the city. Want to come?”

He asked the question hesitantly, as though he could sense her gray mood. She took stock of her posture and her expression—both carefully neutral, as she’d trained herself to be when she was surrounded by people she didn’t know—and smiled as she stepped away from the balcony railing. “Sure,” she said. “What else have I got to do?”

He returned the smile, albeit hesitantly, and they joined Wyn in the hallway.

The good news was Wyn was chatty enough to more than make up for Meri’s silence. The next hour was taken up with stories of his childhood, of how they’d repainted this house since he left New Altea three years ago, of how there used to be a chikor that lived in that park over there, and one time Wyn and Jana had caught it and brought it all the way home before her parents said they had to put it back…

Meri listened with half an ear, her eyes catching on every Altean they passed. She could almost get over the wrongness of the fashions, but she didn’t recognize the food for sale at the carts on the street. Unfamiliar music drifted in and out of her hearing—that might have been a volsichord playing, but the volsichord wasn’t supposed to be played so… _aggressively._

The worst was the fact that she had to use her translator not only to understand Wyn’s stories, but to talk to those she passed, asking after Pygnarat and whether anyone versed in the old arts was still around. These were Alteans, and these were Galra, and she _knew_ Altean and Galran. She had for decades!

And yet without the translator, she could hardly pick out one word in ten—and that only if she could parse the strange, pinched accent of the city.

This was _not_ Altea. She had to keep reminding herself of that fact. It might look familiar, at a glance. It might house the descendants of her people. But it was not a replacement for what she’d lost.

Matt was nearly as quiet as Meri, especially after the first hour turned up nothing promising in their search for a teacher, and she sidled up to him as Wyn stopped outside a bakery to tell them all about the cakes they made.

“You doing okay?” she asked, knocking their elbows together.

Matt shrugged. “I would have liked to find… well, _anything_. But it’s been a long day. I’m sure tomorrow will go better.”

“I’m sure it will.”

The words didn’t seem to reassure Matt any more than they did Meri, and she was relieved when, a few minutes later, Allura called to tell them they were done for the day. “Dinner in our rooms?” Allura suggested.

Meri took one last look around the park they were passing through, where twilight gathered among the branches of unfamiliar trees, and heaved a sigh. “That sounds great.”

* * *

Keith didn’t show up for dinner. Matt tried not to let that worry him. The kid had just been reunited with his mom after more than a decade. If not for minor inconveniences like battle and urgent sessions at the UN to determine how not to let the world burn, Matt would have spent three days latched onto _his_ mother—and he’d only been gone for, what? Eighteen months?

One day was the least he could give Keith.

Still, as dinner went on, Allura and Coran catching him and Meri up on what they’d discussed with the Council, Wyn occasionally jumping in with more trivia about New Altea, Matt found his eyes drifting toward the door. Every pair of footsteps heard through the open window raised his hopes, and the occasional distant slamming door ( _odd_ , how New Altea had so many hinged doors) shot through him like an electric jolt.

It was late by the time they all turned in, each drifting to their own rooms with beds large enough to drown in and a solid twelve inches of blankets. He wondered if New Altean nights were unusually frigid, or if they just wanted to be prepared for guests with different preferences. Probably not the latter; he hadn’t seen anyone here besides him who wasn’t Altean, Galra, or mixed, so he doubted the staff here routinely accounted for wildly different physiologies.

Matt hesitated just inside his room, then backtracked into the corridor and crossed the hall to the room that had been set aside for Keith. He rolled his lip between his teeth for a long moment before lifting a hand and knocking swiftly, before he had time for second thoughts.

To his surprise, the door opened almost immediately. Keith stood there, still dressed in his paladin armor. The silk pajamas—self-sizing, as expected from Alteans—were still laid out on the bed, and Keith didn’t seem to have touched them. He didn’t seem to have touched anything in the room.

“Oh.” Matt blinked, flushing in the face of Keith’s deadpan stare. “Sorry. Didn’t hear you get in. Did you eat?”

“Yeah. My...” The words stuck in Keith’s throat, and his ears folded back. “We ate,” he finished in a small voice.

Matt frowned. That didn’t _sound_ like a ‘I was just reunited with my mom!’ sort of voice. “Did everything… go okay?”

Keith lifted his gaze from the spot on the floor where he’d been staring and shrugged. “I guess so.” He reached down, and Matt suddenly realized there was a new sword hanging from his waist. Keith’s fingers tightened on the hilt. Their eyes locked for a moment, and something in Keith gave way, crumpling his shoulders, pinching the skin between his eyebrows.

“Keith?”

Shaking himself, Keith turned, undid the belt the sword hung from, and tossed it onto the bed. It slid across the silk covers, teetered for a moment, then fell to the floor with a _thud_. Matt cringed.

Keith, on the other hand, seemed not to have noticed. He began prying off his armor, tossing it into the empty wardrobe along the wall opposite the bed. “You want to help me look for a new sword tomorrow?”

Matt frowned at the bed, then at the back of Keith’s head. “What about that one? Where’d you get it?”

“From my mother.”

“Is there something wrong with it?”

“No.”

Matt waited for more, but it didn’t come. Hesitantly, he reached out and touched Keith's shoulder. "Are you okay?"

"I don't want to talk about it," Keith snarled, slapping Matt's hand away. Matt flinched back, and Keith faltered, his eyes dropping to the floor. "Sorry," he muttered. "It's been a long day."

He looked for a moment like he wanted to say more, but the words didn't come. Turning away from Matt, Keith put a hand on the wall for balance as he pulled off his boots. They joined the rest of his armor in the wardrobe, and then he turned his attention to the skintight undersuit, which left furrows in his fur. Keith always showered after he changed out of his armor; he said he always sweat in the suit and sweaty fur was the worst feeling. (Matt, having been inside his head, had to agree.)

But tonight, Keith didn’t bother. He pulled a tee-shirt and shorts out of the bag he’d brought—the only change of clothes he’d bothered with aside from the formal Altean suit Coran had insisted on, just in case—and pulled them on. The muscles in his shoulders jumped as he did so, making his fur twitch like an irritated cat’s, and he spun without looking at Matt and headed for the balcony.

For just a moment, Matt considered leaving. Keith was the sort of person who needed time for himself, and he wasn’t always the best at asking for it. Usually when he disengaged, that was Matt’s cue to give him space.

But something about this felt different. Keith didn’t look his usual sort of tired. He looked small and vulnerable, and if it had been anyone else Matt would have offered a hug. Instead he just followed Keith out onto the balcony, waited for Keith to sit, his legs poking out between the carved balusters. He pulled one arm into his lap as though making space for someone to sit beside him, which was all the invitation Matt needed.

He sat, mimicking Keith’s posture and watching headlights on low-flying hovercraft flicker between buildings. The streetlights here glowed with an almost reddish light—not dimmer than what Matt was used to, not exactly; they illuminated a decent sized circle of ground around the lampposts. But they weren’t the assault on his senses Matt was used to. They weren’t--

They weren’t crystals.

It made sense, he supposed. As isolated as New Altea was, it couldn’t possibly have reliable access to a Balmera, so unless the founders had stumbled upon a planet that produced similar crystals, they would have _had_ to come up with an alternate power source.

How strange.

Keith heaved a sigh, and Matt turned his head, watching as Keith gathered his thoughts. Matt didn’t press, just waited until Keith was ready to talk. It didn’t take long. Leaning backward on his hands, he tilted his face toward the sky.

“She didn’t call me here because she missed me.”

Matt frowned. “Your mother?”

“Mm.”

“Then… why _did_ she send Thace to find you?”

Keith shrugged. “Coincidence, mostly. She wanted Voltron here—I guess she’s been pushing for New Altea to join the war, and she’s hoping we’ll tip the balance in her favor. If I wasn’t a paladin, I doubt she would have sought me out.”

Something hot and cloying lodged itself in Matt’s throat, and he had to dig his nails into his palm to keep from shouting. “You’re _joking._ ”

“Nope.” Keith let out a single, short laugh, then leaned forward, letting out a long breath as he shifted, until his forehead came to rest against the balustrade. “She does have a job for me, though. So… hooray?”

“What sort of job?”

Keith didn’t answer.

Frowning, Matt leaned forward, twisted to look at Keith. “If she expects you to ditch all of us—to give up being a paladin--”

“It’s not that,” Keith said. “She asked me not to tell anyone about it.”

“Oh.” Matt slumped against the railing, his eyes still fixed on Keith. “It’s not anything bad, is it?”

Keith shook his head.

“Is she putting you in danger?”

“No more than I would be in anyway.”

Matt paused. Keith’s voice was light, but his shoulders were pulled up toward his jaw and his ears quivered against his scalp. “But it makes you uncomfortable.”

Keith turned, eyes shining in the darkness. “Yeah. Kinda.”

“Then don’t do it.”

“I have to.”

“Why?” Matt asked. “Because she’s your mom?”

“Because it has to be done.” Keith drew in a breath, straightening up. “Doesn’t matter anyway. It’s just a contingency plan, really. Might not ever happen, and even if it does, that’s months down the line.” He turned, night breeze ruffling his hair. “We can talk about something else.”

Matt didn’t say anything for a long moment. A pair of Galra—at least, they appeared Galra from this distance—passed by on the street three floors below, quiet laughter drifting up to the balcony. The artificial rings around the planet still caught the light of the sun, though it had set several hours ago. They glowed faintly, bronzed crescents across the sky like scars. Two moons lurked behind them, one half-hidden by a ring, the other almost perfectly centered in a diamond-shaped hole between several crossing rings. The result looked eerily like an eye peering down at them.

Eventually, Matt closed his eyes, choosing his words with care. “You were hoping for more, weren’t you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your mom. You were expecting more than dinner and a secret mission.” Matt opened his eyes.

Keith was staring at him slack-jawed, like he couldn’t believe the words coming out of Matt’s mouth. “Of _course_ I was. What kind of--?” He cut off with a strangled sound, but Matt knew him well enough to know where that sentence had been going.

“What kind of mother does that?” he guessed. “Yeah, I’m kinda thinking the same thing right about now.”

Keith bristled, pulling his feet back onto the balcony and hugging his knees to his chest. “It’s not like she did anything _wrong_.”

Matt arched an eyebrow. “She abandoned you to be raised by the Galra army. You have every right to be hurt by that.”

“She did what she had to,” Keith shot back. “This is _war_. Victory has to come first.”

“Now you’re just sounding like Zarkon.”

Keith looked up, hurt flashing across his face, and Matt cringed.

“Sorry. But I mean—come on. _Victory or death?_ I know you don’t believe that horseshit.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Keith said, the cool, smooth surface of his composure faltering. “I _do_. The war _has_ to come first, Matt. It has to! My mother had important information she needed to bring back to New Altea. She’s become one of the most powerful people on the planet—the single strongest voice calling for this alliance.”

“And that makes it okay?”

“Yes!” The cry split the night like a whipcrack, startling Keith into silence. He pulled in tighter on himself, curling around his legs like he was trying to shelter something precious and fragile with his own body. “She did the right thing. She did what _I_ would have done.” Tears sprang to his eyes and he cursed, pressing his fists to his eyes and continuing in a hoarse whisper. “I have no right to be mad at her for what she did.”

Understanding hit Matt like a semi truck. He yanked back the hand that had been reaching out to soothe Keith, a lump trapping the words in his throat. “Keith...”

He faltered, and Keith’s fingers curled tighter, his thumb sliding back and forth along his index finger in a stuttering rhythm.

Swallowing his pain, Matt laid a hand on Keith’s shoulder. He tensed for a moment, then leaned into the touch, and Matt rubbed small circles with his thumb. “Keith, there’s one big difference between the hypothetical choice you would make and the one your mother made.”

“Let me guess. 'I haven’t done it yet. I can still _change_.'” Bitterness dripped from his words, falling heavy to the balcony beneath them. “I won’t, though. I know myself well enough to know I’ll always pick the mission.”

Matt hummed, but kept his skepticism at bay—for now. When Keith was calmer, maybe, Matt could point out that he’d risked the mission more than once to save a friend. To save Lance, to spare Shiro’s life when Haggar was inside his head.

He wouldn’t listen now, though. Not with his emotions in a jumble like this.

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Matt said, careful to keep his tone even. “You’re not a parent. Who is it you think you’d abandon to complete your mission? Your teammates? In what universe would we put you in that position? If there’s something that needs to be done, we’ll _always_ be right there with you. And if we aren’t? Then _go_. We aren’t helpless. We can make our own choices and fight our own fights.” He paused, drawing in a deep breath to temper the fire rising in his chest. “ _You_ were a little kid. Your mom left when you didn’t understand what the war was even about. You couldn’t _choose_ what happened to you. You couldn’t protect yourself—not for a long time after she was gone.”

“But--”

Matt squeezed Keith’s shoulder, silencing him. “You put the mission first. Fair enough. But until you have someone depending on you the way a kid depends on his parents, you can’t possibly say you’d make the choice she did.”

Keith stared at him, wide-eyed, his breath coming in uneven spurts. He seemed at a loss for words, and Matt suddenly felt the weight of his tirade hanging over him. He flushed, giving Keith’s shoulder a playful shove.

“Whatever. You don’t need to figure out how you feel about her tonight. You’ve still got a family, whether or not you decide to add her to it.”

“I… what?”

Matt grinned, ruffling his hair. Keith squawked, leaning away from Matt’s hand, and Matt laughed. “Family,” he repeated. “That’s what we are, aren’t we? I mean… Mom might be willing to share the mothering duties with your mom, if that’s how it works out, but it’s not like she’s just going to quietly bow out because it turns out you aren’t technically an orphan. Have you _seen_ her with Shiro and Akira?”

Keith breathed out a chuckle, leaning his shoulder against Matt’s. “She is pretty scary when she wants to be.”

Matt grunted his agreement, looping his arm under Keith’s and resting his hand on Keith’s shoulder. “And even without her, we’re still brothers. Right?”

Keith smiled, his ears pricking up even as he ducked his head bashfully. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess we are.”

"Good." Matt brought his other arm around, smiling as Keith sank into the hug. _And if she ever does anything to hurt you,_ he added silently, _she'll have to answer to me._


	3. The Spirit of Altea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time: Matt, Keith, and the Alteans arrived on New Altea to general disappointment--the planet they found is not the planet they remember from ten thousand years ago, and Keith's reunion with his mother was distinctly lacking in apologies or warm sentiments. Meanwhile on Earth, the other paladins fended off another attack from Zarkon's forces. Nyma continues to warn of a spy on the castle-ship, but the subject fell by the wayside when Lance and Val synced up, giving Val access to a new weapons array and leaving Nyma feeling distinctly out of place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand I've already had to up the chapter count. Whoops. This chapter had two chapters worth of content in it. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> Anyway, season 4 released last weekend, but this fic is already so far removed from canon that you have zero reason to worry about spoilers. I might introduce one or two new characters from the new season somewhere down the line, but that's about as much as you can expect me to pull from canon at this point.

“The market can’t _support_ all-out war. What do you think happens if we lose a big chunk of our--our workforce. If we send away-- _all_ our ships. And then there's the cost in raw materials. We don't have interplanetary trade to fall back on if we run out of--of vorthium or--or--I don't know, _something._ We're running on limited resources here!” Kortek, the Galra who occupied the Seat of Economics, rubbed a nervous hand along her ear. She wasn’t much of one for debate, but she’d stubbornly clung to her opposition, even as Vek, the Seat of Education and the most vocal member of the opposition, began to soften. If Allura could call thoughtful silences between eir challenges _soft._

Allura sighed, rubbing her temples as Kortek, stuttering, outlined—again—all the ways in which a war might destabilize New Altea’s economy. Allura had heard all this before, of course. This was the start of the third day of negotiations, and everyone had more or less run out of arguments, which left them all banging their heads against walls that stubbornly refused to come down.

It wasn’t that the Council was opposed to an alliance. They desperately wanted to see an end to Zarkon’s empire, and they had already volunteered to grant Allura and Shiro the clearance to review the Accords’ records. Anything New Altea’s spies had uncovered, any weaknesses or plans that might help in Voltron’s fight—Allura had it all at her fingertips, and though Keena had not said anything aloud, Allura suspected that if she recommended the woman send her spies to investigate a particular secret, Keena would make every effort to comply.

No, the problem was whether or not New Altea was to fully invest in the war effort by committing troops, ships, and technology: the very things Voltron most desperately needed. Keena, Kolivan, and Amay, the Altean woman who occupied the Seat of Justice, supported the proposal. Vek, Kortek, and Meeran (Seat of Culture and Senate Chair) were less enthusiastic.

It was frustrating, but Allura had to concede that their reservations were well founded. New Altea was a small, vulnerable planet with all the civic considerations that came with sustaining an isolated population. If Zarkon discovered their existence, he would hunt them with every resource he had available to him, and ten thousand years wasn’t long enough a time to forget the massacre Zarkon had perpetrated once before.

It was just that Allura had expected _more._ She’d expected loyalty, enthusiasm, and a burning sense of justice. Instead, she’d found bureaucracy and a stubborn bent toward the status quo.

She took comfort in Yvis’s assurances that the Council was not representative of the populace as a whole. There were people who opposed the war, yes, but there had been calls for intervention for generations, and they’d been gaining support even before the return of Voltron. As people learned of Allura’s visit, Yvis said, there would be an outpouring of support, and when the treaty went to the Planetary Senate for ratification, it would pass without much trouble.

Or so ze said. Allura was less certain—and anyway, that concern was still some days down the line. It was the High Council who would draft the treaty, the High Council who would present it to the Senate—four of them, anyway; Keena and Kolivan, as heads of the Accords and the military, were not senators. (That was just another thing to worry about, as an unfavorable presentation could well undo whatever work she managed in these meetings.)

And although the Senate would pass the finalized treaty, which would be binding for its duration, only the Council had the authority to dispatch ships or technicians _now_ to begin building Earth’s defenses. Allura needed these people on her side.

“There is risk,” Allura said, straining to keep her voice even. Her eyes were on Kortek, though she meant her words for Vek. Ey were much more likely to be swayed by rational argument, and once she had a majority on her side, she thought she might be able to win over the other two. “But there _will_ be risk for as long as Zarkon is in power. You already have your people out there, putting their lives on the line. All it takes is one spy getting captured, getting tortured. If Zarkon finds you, he will destroy you—but if we take a stand now, we may defeat him before he has that chance.”

Kortek dropped her eyes, but there was that ever-present pinch to her lips, that twitch of her ears that said she wasn’t even bothering to consider what Allura had to say. She listened to Meeran, and he listened to her, and even if they didn’t agree with the other councilors, they at least acknowledged their opinions—even Keena’s, despite a personal animosity that soured the air between them.

Allura might as well have been a yelmore crooning in the pasture for all the heed they paid her.

“If I may, Princess,” Coran said, bowing slightly. Allura waved him forward, glad for a moment’s reprieve. Three days with these people, and it seemed she’d made no progress at all. Every argument she could think of she’d already made—several times. What was she supposed to do if they wouldn’t see reason, scream in their faces?

It was a tempting thought.

Coran cleared his throat, standing with his head high. “The only way we’re going to defeat Zarkon is if we amass an army on par with his. No one planet, no one people is going to be able to supply that, not with the way the universe is right now. Your military officers say your force is small, but it could inspire others to join the fight.”

“The Voltron Coalition,” Vek said, nodding eir head. Allura had brought up the Coalition before—an idea she, Coran, and Shiro had been discussing for some time now, but not one they’d ever devised a feasible way to create.

Allura nodded. “Similar in concept to the old Voltron Guard, but on a massive scale. An alliance of all free peoples. Voltron is a starting point, the Kera Rebellion a valuable ally, but if you join? If Altea rises from the ashes—if a population of the Galra people take a stand against Zarkon’s empire, what might that inspire?”

“You assume there is a flame to ignite,” Meeran said. “Yet the universe did not rise to defy Zarkon ten thousand years ago. They did not band together after Altea fell and stop the evil they must have seen spreading.”

“They were disorganized,” Keena said, exasperated. “Altea _was_ the alliance. Without it, and without Voltron, there was no one who could fight back.”

“Bah.” Meeran flicked a hand. “Nothing has changed, except that Zarkon has grown stronger. If Voltron had returned sooner, perhaps--”

Allura’s blood boiled, but it was Amay who shot to her feet. She was short, even for an Altean, but when her temper sparked it was like tossing Pidge into a fraught standoff: sparks turned swiftly to open flames.

“This isn’t ten thousand years ago, Meeran,” Amay snapped. “Whine all you like, but _this_ is our reality. Zarkon slaughters innocents, and Voltron stands alone against him. We are Altean—Altean, _sothra,_ and _asothra_ alike. We stand in opposition to all Zarkon perpetrates. If we don’t fight, then what _are_ we?”

Meeran’s face darkened, but he didn’t strike back. Allura almost wished he had; when he disengaged like this, there was no getting through to him.

Helpless, Allura looked to Coran, then to Kolivan, Keena, and Amay. None of them had anything more to offer; even Amay seemed disheartened by the particle barrier the other half of the council had erected around themselves. She huffed and dropped back into her seat, glaring at Meeran like she wanted very much to drag him by the ear to the dueling grounds and give him a solid thrashing.

Sighing, Allura leaned her hands on the council table before her. She bowed her head and closed her eyes, her heart aching. “This is _not_ the Altea I remember,” she said, clenching her jaw as Yvis let out a sound of dismay. She raised her head, fixing each council member with a stare in turn. “People are suffering all across the universe at this very moment. My people would not abandon them. _I_ will not abandon them.”

Meeran shifted in his seat uncomfortably, his face burning crimson so his pale green _glaes_ stood out in stark contrast. “Perhaps a recess is in order. We have other matters to see to, and I think we could all use a bit of time to… cool our tempers.”

Allura’s head snapped up, and she bit down on a sharp retort. These were her _allies._ She couldn’t tear into them—no matter how much they deserved it.

Kolivan rumbled deep in his throat, catching her eye. She glowered at him.

“I second the motion for a recess,” he said, and before Allura could protest, the council was on their feet, Meeran and Kortek scurrying from the room, pursued by a gaggle of assistants. Vek hesitated a moment longer, chewing on eir lip. Eir teeth were sharper than most Alteans’—just one more sign of eir heritage, along with eir coarse violet hair and yellow sclera. Ey seemed like ey wanted to say something, then faltered and hurried out of the room.

Allura rounded on Kolivan. “We don’t need a recess,” she said, straining for calm. “We _need_ for the other councilors to see sense.”

Kolivan sighed. “I understand your frustration, your highness, and I will talk to them. But we have hit a dead end here. Pushing harder will not get us anywhere we want to be.”

“So we back down?” Allura demanded. “The very universe is at stake.”

Coran placed a hand on her shoulder, holding her gaze when she rounded on him. He looked older than his four hundred and fifty years, with lines around his eyes Allura rarely noticed. “Perhaps Kolivan is right,” he said gently. “We should get some fresh air, eat some food. Come back to this with a level head and refreshed patience.”

Allura doubted very much whether an hour or two would cool her raging temper, but she conceded. If nothing else, she could use the time to come up with some new argument to make that might sway the council to her point of view.

“Very well,” she said coldly. “I suppose lunch does sound good.”

Kolivan nodded sharply. “You ought to stop by the New Alafor training facility. Antok, my second in command, would be happy to give you and your companions a tour, and I’m sure my troops would be glad of the visit. They have been hungry to join the war for some time now.”

“Good to know _someone_ is,” she muttered, then let Coran lead her toward the door. Today, she suspected, was going to be a very long day.

* * *

Shiro spun his staff, slapping away the gladiator’s sword. The shock of the blow reverberated up his arms, catching where his prosthetic met his residual limb. It was still a new sensation, this prosthetic. He’d grown used to having Haggar’s monstrosity grafted onto him, his bone fused with the metal rod at the mechanical arm’s core. That had hurt in its own way—and considerably more than this one did—but it was familiar, etched into him by months of fighting.

He hadn’t done much fighting with this prosthetic, and most of what he had done he’d done with a laser pistol in hand. The socket and harness absorbed a considerable amount of stress, but he wasn’t keen to try heavy fighting without his armor, which further reinforced the point of contact. He was going to want to get back into the habit of keeping a handgun on him for emergencies, especially in situations where he might find himself exposed without his armor.

But it felt wrong to wield a gun now. He didn’t know why that was—he’d trained with firearms at the Garrison long before he became a paladin. He’d used them in the Galra army, too, though that was mostly an excuse to avoid having to actually hurt any of the locals he was ostensibly attacking. Hell, he used lasers every time he fought in Black.

But he needed to be closer to the action. Needed to feel his opponent’s blows in his bones. Needed to—Needed to _be there_ , up close, so he could be sure the enemy never had a chance to break through to the rest of his team. Lance, Ryner, Hunk, even Pidge and Matt in certain situations—they needed space to fight. If Shiro could give them that space, then he would. Whatever the cost.

The gladiator came in for another attack, and Shiro swung, but he was a split second too slow with his block. The staff was longer than he was used to, which meant it took longer to get where he needed it to be, and he only managed to deflect the strike enough so that it didn’t hit him in the chest. His shoulder took the brunt of the impact, and he stumbled back, swinging back-handed before the gladiator could capitalize on his weakness. Staff and sword cracked sharply as the connected, but the gladiator recovered quickly, lining up for another attack.

“End training sequence,” Shiro grunted, lifting his hand to massage his shoulder. Nothing broken, thankfully, but he was going to have a nasty bruise there later.

Grimacing, he crossed to the control panel set into the wall and called down the armory racks. He replaced the staff in its spot, between the sword that reminded him too much of the Arena and the whip, which he’d abandoned long before he tried it against the gladiator. He couldn’t seem to get it to listen to him, and he didn’t have the time to learn an entirely new fighting style.

He passed over the spear he’d intended to try next, knowing he’d have the same problem there as he had with the staff. There were several polearms on the rack, actually, only a few of which Shiro recognized, and beside them a mace, a hooked blade unlike anything he’d seen before, and a small silver disk that expanded to an elongated energy shield when he picked it up.

He considered this for a long moment before putting it back. It pulled at him—defensive, nonlethal, easily used to protect his friends.

But they didn’t need a shield when they already had Shay, whose bayard was stronger than any ordinary shield. She could hold off any enemy, could guard the team’s rear or protect a fallen ally as she administered first aid. That was her role, and she filled it well—but it wasn’t who Shiro needed to be. He needed to be on the front lines, tearing through enemy swarms before they became too much for the rest of the team.

He left the polearms behind and crossed to the other side of the rack, where more compact weapons were arrayed: swords and daggers in varying styles, sharp-edged rings similar to chakrams, picks and hammers, axes and clubs. Some he rejected at once—the chakram-like weapons and the more unusual weapons because he didn’t know how to use them, the hammers and axes because he’d seen first hand their potential to maim.

Not that there existed a weapon that _couldn’t_ maim, if used either with exceptional skill or with stunning ineptitude, but it was different with weapons that were designed for brutality. He would fight, but he when he killed, he would make it as painless as possible.

The door hissed open before he could make a decision, and he turned, somewhat surprised to find Nyma standing in the doorway.

She froze when she saw him, but Beezer ran into her from behind, forcing her to stumble into the room. “Vrekking—Watch it, rust bucket,” she grumbled at him, pursing her lips when he answered with a squat buzzing. Smoothing back her hair-like head-tails, Nyma flashed Shiro what she probably thought was a charming smile. It looked more like a grimace of pain. “Sorry. Didn’t realize anyone was in here. I’ll find somewhere else.”

“It’s fine,” Shiro said. “Did you come to train?”

Nyma rolled her neck, her hand tightening on the helmet she held at her side. It had been more than an hour since they’d all returned from the last battle—long enough by far for her to have changed out of her armor if she’d wanted to, and usually she couldn’t get out of it fast enough. He wondered what made today different.

Beezer chirped at her, and she let out a low scoff. “Ugh, fine, yes,” she said. “I’m not used to wearing bulky armor, okay? Figured it’d be smart to get used to moving in it before it gets me killed. And I don’t need _you_ nagging me,” she added to Beezer, who rocked to one side, buzzing in a way that sounded very much like he was blowing a raspberry.

Shiro arched an eyebrow, leaning his elbow on the weapons rack as he considered her. “So were you looking to spar, or just running some drills?”

Nyma narrowed her eyes. “I’m not about to take _you_ on, if that’s what you’re asking. I try not to make a habit of breaking bones.”

“A friendly match.” Shiro held up his hands, chuckling. “I’m trying out new weapons, and I could do with a break from the beat-downs myself.”

She eyed him up and down, shifting her weight to one side as she crossed her arms over her chest. “What level do you have this thing _on_ , anyway?”

“Too high, I’m sure. But I need a challenge.”

Nyma snorted. “You need a _cryopod_ , by the looks of it.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Uh-huh…” She rapped her knuckles on the wall, and a storage bin slid out. It stood about waist high, and Nyma hopped up onto it, sitting with her knees crossed as she considered him. “What?”

Shiro tried, belatedly, to cover his surprise. “Sorry. I didn’t realize you’d spent so much time exploring the intricacies of Altean training decks.”

With a snort, Nyma leaned back on her hands. “I’ve spent some time in here, yeah. I’ve got to at least _try_ to keep up with the rest of you.”

“Keep up? Nyma, don’t sell yourself short. Val owes you her life.”

“Yeah, okay Mr. Leader Man.” Nyma waved one hand in the air, her dismissive aura faltering somewhat when Beezer interjected in his peculiar language. “Look, I’m not here for a pep talk, I just want to beat some shit up. And if that shit happens to be you, then I guess that’s how it’s gonna have to be." She smiled, sharp-edged and taunting. “You ever used a Gorvarian wrist dagger before?”

“A what?”

Nyma hopped down and crossed to the weapons rack, selecting a bladed weapon attached to what looked like a metal bracer. She fitted it to her wrist, gripping the dowel-like handle that protruded from the dull edge of the blade. The result was a dagger that ran the length of her forearm, serrated along the back half. A matching blade on the other wrist completed the look.

The way Nyma held herself, she was intimately acquainted with the weapons.

“I thought you were more of a ranged fighter,” he said, feeling suddenly nervous.

Nyma only smiled and sauntered out to the center of the room. “I’ve learned to fight dirty,” she said. “It’s how you survive in the Empire. Scared?”

“Yes,” Shiro said, but he selected a push dagger and a lightweight shield from the armory and stepped out to face Nyma across the center line.

* * *

Like Kolivan, Antok was _sothra—_ his mother’s family had lived on New Altea for generations, and his father had come here as a young man. No one had said it outright, but Allura suspected his father hadn’t been fully Galra. Antok towered over most of the other Galra, his shoulders almost as wide as Allura and Meri combined, and he had a long, nimble tail—not entirely unheard of among Galra, but usually an indication of mixed descent. He wore a mask under the hood of his Defense uniform, which covered every inch of him except his tail, and Allura suspected she would find undeniable marks of his heritage if he were to remove it.

Mixed heritage was a compelling reason for someone to leave the Galra Empire, which had a low tolerance for “impurity,” but there were strata to New Altea’s social structure that Allura was only just beginning to see. Antok was _sothra._  That afforded him a level of trust that didn’t extend to _asothra_ like Keena. She might occupy the Seat of Intelligence on the High Council, but she didn’t hold the same standing as the others.

 _I suppose it makes sense,_ Allura told herself, trying to focus on Antok’s words as he showed them the armory and the sparring salons where soldiers fought. They’d picked up Meri, Matt, and Keith on their way, though Wyn was once more out somewhere with Jana. _Their culture is built on the back of our people’s greatest tragedy and the betrayal that nearly wiped us out. They survived only through caution._

An officer—one of the few ranking Alteans Allura had seen here—approached them, joining his hands at the level of his navel, palms up. “Princess,” he said, nodding to Meri and to Coran and to Keith and then, after a moment’s hesitation, to Matt. The man’s eyes lingered too long on Matt’s ears, but that was a notable improvement over the first few officers to greet them, who had all stared at Matt like he was the first off-worlder they’d ever seen.

“I had heard of your arrival,” the man said. “I am Second Lieutenant Tiska. Allow me to extend my welcome. I trust your stay has been pleasant?”

“It has,” Allura said formally. “Thank you. Antok was just showing us your facility.”

“Of course.” Tiska gave Antok the same curt salute the other officers had offered him. There was nothing overtly hostile about the gesture, but it seemed… cold. Distant in the same way most of New Altea’s soldiers were distant from him. Allura hadn’t yet figured out if that was a social phenomenon, a personal animosity, or the appropriate distance between a man and his subordinates.

She was out of her depth here, and the list of people who might train her in the cultural nuances of these people was uncomfortably short. Yvis had other duties to attend to during the recess, and ze saw no reason why Allura and the others shouldn’t wander the city without an interpreter. Allura missed hir already. Ze wasn’t the warmest person Allura had ever met, but she’d give anything for hir crisp, uncompromising analysis.

“Forgive me, Princess,” Tiska said, bowing his head. “But I grew up listening to the stories of King Alfor’s valor. How he stood alone against Zarkon for three days, giving our people time enough to get away. It is an honor to meet his daughter.”

Unexpected tears sprang to Allura’s eyes. For all the politicians, aides, and soldiers who had sought her out these last three days, not a single one had uttered her father’s name. She’d almost begun to think New Altea had forgotten him entirely. “Thank you,” she said. “I am honored to have the privilege of seeing the world his sacrifice made possible.”

Coran’s eyes darted her way; likely he could see the ache Tiska and Antok could not. It was a bittersweet feeling—knowing her father was long dead and gone to these people. A heroic figure from the past, not a king to be mourned. But she’d needed to hear someone call him a hero. To say he’d lived well and died with honor. She needed someone who wasn’t blinded by affection to tell her it was okay to still admire him. After months of secrets and fragmented memories and whispers of some dark past between him and Zarkon, she’d begun to wonder.

No doubt the legends Tiska had heard growing up were a gross exaggeration on the truth, but they were comforting all the same.

Tiska spouted a few more pleasantries before he scurried off, and Antok continued the tour as though nothing had happened. He was a taciturn man, offering little in the way of small talk as they walked, and Allura was wary of asking prying questions.

“Our armies are small,” he said, stopping with his hands clasped behind his back. “But they are well trained.” They stood on a viewing area overlooking a room filled with simulator stations—pilot training. Some two dozen people filled the room. Perhaps three-quarters of the pilots were Galra, though Allura was learning that in places like New Alafor, most of the population had some degree of mixed ancestry. The Galra and Alteans here had coexisted for too long with too little connection to the rest of the universe for them not to have intermarried.

“Small?” Allura asked. They’d been through only a portion of this building— _one_ training facility out of how many across the planet? “With respect, Lieutenant, I don’t think you’re fully aware of the current state of the universe. There are very few armies out there besides Zarkon’s, and even fewer with the technology or training to make a difference in this fight. Believe me when I say your armies could well turn the tide of this war.”

Antok bowed his head, turned, and continued on. “Thank you, Highness, but we are not ignorant of the war. We know the strength of those we face. We know the size of their armies, the might behind their weapons. We know the monstrosities they create. Our strength is not sufficient to defeat the Empire. Not alone, and perhaps not even with Voltron to lead the charge.”

Matt’s steps slowed, and he fell behind, dropping out of Allura’s line of sight. “How many spies do you guys have, anyway?”

“Enough,” Antok said. “And yet not nearly enough. I do not know the number.”

“But you have spies, like, _everywhere_ inside the Galra army. Right?”

Allura turned toward Matt and found him staring at the ground, his hands clenched into fists at his side. Keith hovered beside him, face troubled, and shot an appraising look toward Antok.

Slowing his pace, Antok tilted his head to the side. “There are some areas our spies cannot penetrate.”

“Yeah, _okay._ ” Matt’s shoulders rose toward his ears. “But you’re in the army? The work camps? You were the ones who warned us about the override and the tracker in Shiro’s arm. You were the ones who found out about the cybernetic warriors stationed on Earth—about Project Balmera.” His breath hitched, and he flinched as Keith lifted a hand in what Allura thought was supposed to be a calming gesture. “You _knew_.”

Matt lifted his head, and the pain in his eyes left Allura breathless.

“You _knew_ how many people they were hurting, all the terrible things they were doing. You—your spies—your  _leaders—_ knew about Keith, about _Shiro_? You stood a better chance of stopping Zarkon than _anyone_. Why didn’t you do anything?”

Antok was silent for a long moment, the rest of them frozen, a palpable chill in the air as Matt waited for an answer.

At length, Antok sighed. “We are sworn to protect this planet and to prepare for Voltron’s return. What good would it have done to throw our lives away in an unwinnable fight?”

Matt’s mouth tightened, and the chill in the air turned to the crackle of lightning— _No,_ Allura realized, her skin crawling. That was the crackle of _Quintessence._ Beside her, Meri and Coran stiffened, their gazes darting to Matt, who ground his teeth together, the light catching the vibrant blue of his left eye.

“You could have saved lives,” he said. “Instead of watching as millions suffered and died needlessly.”

He waited, Quintessence boiling across the surface of his skin—visible now, though Matt seemed unaware of it himself. Allura tensed, wondering if she would need to physically hold Matt back from attacking Antok. Keith wrapped a hand around Matt’s elbow, concern evident in the slope of his ears.

Antok bowed his head. “The time was not yet right.”

The light fixture on the wall, carved in the likeness of a crystal but artificially lit, shattered, the sound of it jarring, like the crack of the humans’ guns, and Allura gave a start as this section of hallway plunged into darkness. In that moment, she saw that Matt’s eye wasn’t only figuratively blazing; it shone crystal blue, as brightly as Keith’s, though in a different way. The currents of Quintessence idled in the air around him for a moment before he turned, muttering under his breath.

“I’m going back to our rooms,” he said as he left. “Let me know if you need me for anything.”

Keith hesitated, glancing back at Antok, who hadn’t moved since the light fixture shattered, then chased after Matt.

Allura’s mouth ran dry as she watched them go.

 _You knew,_ Matt had said. And he was right. The Accords—the spy network of New Altea—did seem to have extensive knowledge of the secrets of the Galra Empire. They knew about Project Balmera before anyone else… Had they also known about CORE? Had they known what Haggar had done to Matt for nearly a year before his return to Earth?

Allura wished she knew the answer.

* * *

Nyma roared as she spun into a kick, her heel connecting with Shiro’s jaw. Stars exploded behind his eyelids and he stumbled backward, swearing colorfully. Nyma didn’t slow, though. She pressed forward, daggers flashing. One caught on the straps of his shield, shearing through. With a flick of her wrist, she tore it from Shiro’s grasp, flinging it across the room to strike the far wall with a ringing crash.

Shiro ducked the next strike, spreading his stance. He was immovable, unyielding, and he caught Nyma’s next strike in his bare hand, spinning under it and bringing his dagger up. She froze, the tip of the blade hovering between her eyes.

“Yield,” Nyma muttered, face souring. “Bastard.”

Shiro laughed, lowering his dagger and going to fetch his lost shield. “Damn,” he muttered once he caught his breath. “You’re no pushover.” He grabbed two hand towels from the storage bin in the wall and tossed one to Nyma before wiping the sweat from his face.

Nyma caught the towel, smirking, and flopped down against the wall beside him. “Like I said. I fight dirty.”

“You and me both,” Shiro said. He sat beside her, pretending not to feel the weight of her gaze on him. He turned slowly, arching an eyebrow when he found her watching him incredulously. “Oh, come on. You must have heard the stories of the Champion.”

Nyma snorted. “Well, _sure._ I even believed them till I met you.”

Her words brought a smile to Shiro’s lips. “I’m flattered. But, no. I was the Champion.” He lifted one shoulder in a shrug, trying not to show the lingering shame that still woke whenever he thought of his time in the Arena. “Like you said. It’s how you survive.”

“Yeah.” Nyma breathed out a long breath, leaning her head back against the wall behind them. “Sometimes makes you feel like the odd man out, doesn’t it?”

The ache of sympathy was so strong that for a moment he couldn’t respond. How many times had he thought just that? Surrounded by people like Shay, who always sought nonviolent alternatives, like Hunk and Lance, who drew their lines and stood firm… Like Matt, who had never lost his kind heart, despite everything that had been done to him—it made Shiro feel like a pretender to the title of paladin.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean.”

“I mean, I’ve done so much shit, you know?” Nyma waved her hand, her other arm coming to rest atop her knees. As tall and lithe as she was, she managed to make herself look small—not in a vulnerable way; there was still a wall of steel behind her eyes that staved off any attempt at commiseration. She was small in a way that reminded Shiro of a wild dog guarding its kill, keenly aware that it was surrounded by creatures that would turn on it in an instant. “I don’t regret it. I have my own life to live, and I’m not about to throw it away for some prissy set of morals. It just makes you wonder. When everyone around you—when they’re all—” She huffed flipping her hand. “I don’t even fucking know, okay? I just have to wonder if Blue was tripping balls when she chose me.”

Shiro chuckled. “Believe me, you’re not the only one. No one here is a soldier. Not many of us feel like we deserve to be here.” He held up his hands as Nyma opened her mouth to snap at him. “I know it’s not the same. I know. The first time I flew the Black Lion, I kept expecting her to spit me out at thirty thousand feet once she realized what I'd  done.”

“And how long did it take you to get used to it?”

“A couple days, I guess? But there are still times I have to wonder. After Haggar took control of me, after...” He licked his lips, the cavity in his chest yawning wide. It had only been two weeks—not even that—since the others had brought him back. Since they'd lopped off his arm and forced Haggar out of his head. He’d had another nightmare just last night, watched himself rip Pidge’s throat out and laugh in Matt’s face. “You know what I keep telling myself?”

“What?”

Shiro lifted his head and smiled at her. “We weren’t chosen because we were perfect. That’s not what it means to be a paladin. All that matters is that you care, and you keep fighting. And who knows? Maybe we were chosen _because_ we’ve made those hard choices. We’ve been there, and we know how to survive.” He stared at his hand, and the unfamiliar weight of it struck him anew. “I’m glad I’m here to do what needs to be done, because that means the others don’t have to become what the Arena made me into.” He met Nyma’s eyes, smiling. “They're good people. They make _us_ better people. Our job it to make sure they never have to do what we did in the name of survival.”

Nyma blinked, sitting up a little straighter. “Huh,” she said. “I never thought of it that way.”

Shiro clapped her on the shoulder. “That’s what I’m here for. Now.” He pushed himself to his feet and carried his shield and dagger back to the weapons rack. “I don’t think this is working.”

“You should try the Gorvarian wrist daggers,” she said, unfastening the bracers on her wrists and handing them over. The blades had retracted after the sparring match, but they reappeared in a flash of light as Shiro put them on. He looked up, and Nyma grinned. “Don’t hold back this time, either.” She went to the weapons rack and selected a pair of pistols. “Cause I ain’t gonna baby you again.”

* * *

“I understand your hesitation,” Kolivan said to the council when they reconvened that afternoon. His face was grave, his voice hard, and Allura sat tense in her seat beside him. He’d said he had a plan—one last gambit that might win her the support she needed. She was anxious to find out what it was.

“The paladins are not from our world. They are unproven.” The other Seats shifted, discomfort playing across their faces. The word _asothra_ hung unspoken in the air, pulling at the corners of Keena’s eyes, tightening her grip on the arms of her chair. Yvis glanced at her, then at Allura, as though looking to see whether she’d noticed. When their eyes met, Yvis looked away, tawny skin flushing.

So that was it. Allura was _asothra,_ if an Altean could be called such. She was an outsider. She was unproven. Unworthy of trust.

“Let us then give them a chance to prove themselves,” Kolivan said, his words ringing like a hammerfall in the silence. “A test of strength and honor. If they succeed, we join the Coalition. If not, we go our separate ways.” He turned to Allura. “Is this acceptable?”

Part of Allura wanted to laugh in his face. A test of Voltron’s might? A test of her loyalty to her own people?

But, no. If this was what had to be done, so be it. Voltron _needed_ this alliance. “We will undertake your test, Councilor Kolivan. But the homeworld of several of my paladins is under threat. We cannot leave it unguarded. If you wish to send Voltron on this mission, you must provide a force to guard their people until we reach a final decision on the treaty.”

“Send our--” Vek cut off with a squeak, eir eyes darting toward Meeran. “That would mean exposing ourselves to Zarkon’s eye! We might as well just join the Coalition at that point.”

“The alternative is to let another innocent world die as Altea did,” Allura said coldly. “If that is something you can conscience, then I have no desire to ally with you.”

Vek’s eyes widened, and ey made a hasty, calming gesture. “No— _no._ I don’t mean—only, it’s not much of a compromise if we have to join the war in everything but declaration. Zarkon’s going to wonder where you got this new force, and if he gets a hold of even a single ship...”

Allura pressed her lips together. “Then you may use the ships of the Voltron Guard,” she said, turning her shoulder to the council table to make it clear she was addressing Kolivan specifically. “You may choose who you send, but we will need at least fifty pilots. Twice that if this tests requires us to pull our allies away from Earth, as well.”

“That can be arranged,” Kolivan said. He turned to the rest of the Council. “I will be present to observe the test. The rest of you may choose for yourselves, but if you choose to stay behind, you abstain from this vote. If it must be unanimous, you cannot vote in ignorance.”

“I’ll go,” Vek said at once. Ey paused, seeming to hear eir own eagerness, and ducked eir head. “A suitable display might well change my mind. I would see what the paladins have to offer.”

“I will go as well,” said Meeran. “If only to lend the test some measure of impartiality.”

Kortek nodded. “Then I abstain. I trust Meeran’s judgment, and I would rather not leave our own people without their leaders.”

“I’m staying, too,” Keena said. “It’s better for us all that I not show my face where the Empire might recognize me.”

Kolivan nodded, as though he’d been expecting this, and turned to Amay. “And you?”

“I will come. Princess Allura rightly said that we have been too ignorant of the state of the universe. I won’t turn away any longer. I will bear witness to the atrocities of the Empire.”

“Very well.” Kolivan turned to Allura. “It will take us a few days to arrange this test and organize the pilots who will fly under your banner, but I am sure you are eager to return to your people. You may leave when you wish, and we will join you within the movement.”

Something in Allura eased. Not fully; she wouldn’t be truly at ease until this treaty was signed, but this was progress. She could go on breathing as long as she had taken a step in the right direction. “Thank you, Councilor Kolivan. I look forward to meeting with you again.”

She bowed only enough to not be disrespectful, then turned and led Coran and Yvis out of the room. A patter of footsteps chased after them, and Allura turned to find Vek standing there, hands clasped before em.

“Princess, I--” Ey hesitated, eyes sliding askance. “I wanted to wish you luck.”

“Luck?” Allura asked, pursing her lips. “With what?”

Vek squared eir shoulders. “With the test. I’m sure you don’t need luck. I’ve heard stories of Voltron’s power—we all have.”

“And yet you refuse to aid us.” Allura’s voice was cold—hardly fitting for a diplomat, she knew, but she didn’t care. She didn’t owe these people her courtesy.

Vek bowed eir head. “I want to aid you, Princess. Truly I do. But I have a responsibility to my people. I cannot commit to this without knowing it is the right gamble to make.”

Allura pressed her lips together, breathing out through her nose. She understood that responsibility. She’d only just begun to lead her people before Zarkon’s betrayal, but she’d seen often enough how much it strained her father to have to balance the needs of the universe with the safety of those living on the castle-ship.

As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t hate Vek for choosing eir own people.

“Then I suppose we’ll just have to show you our strength,” she said, holding Vek’s gaze for a long moment. “I’ll see you in a few days.”

She turned, not waiting for a response, and rejoined Coran and Yvis by the doors. Coran gave her a questioning look, but Allura only shook her head. She wasn’t in the mood to discuss her first impressions of New Altea—especially when she knew more than half of her bitterness to be her own expectations crashing down on her. These were _fine_ people, and they’d done nothing that should make her feel as though she’d been eviscerated, and if this were any other planet, she would take the request of proof in stride.

But it was _New Altea._ That made a difference.

“Thank you for all your aid, Yvis,” Allura said, tamping down on her rage. “I hope we meet again.”

“Oh.” Ze blinked, hir white _glaes_ glowing against hir tawny skin as a flush crept in. “Actually, I had thought of coming with you.” Hir words slowed at the end, and for the first time since Allura had known hir, ze seemed almost uncertain.

Allura tipped her head to the side, frowning. “Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to take you away from your home.”

Yvis shook hir head. “I’m Keeper of History, your highness. I’ve studied Voltron my entire life. There is very little I wouldn’t give to see the Castle of Lions first hand.” Ze faltered suddenly, blush deepening. “Not that it’s all about me, of course. I would be glad to continue telling you about our culture and history. You’re still going to need to negotiate with the council and all, so more knowledge can only help.”

Well, ze wasn’t _wrong_. Allura’s pride stung a bit at the admission, but Yvis had a point. Allura needed to understand the political climate on New Altea better if she hoped to find common ground with Meeran and the other councilors.

She nodded. “In that case, you are very welcome to join us, Yvis. We’ll be collecting the rest of our friends and heading to the airfield in about a varga. If you’ll finish whatever business you have and meet us there?”

“Yes, your highness,” Yvis said, grinning as ze bobbed hir head. Ze spun without another word and darted through a side door to the offices that choked the Council Hall.

Coran gave Allura a weary smile. “Thank the ancients for people like Yvis, eh, Princess?”

Allura snorted. “Thank the ancients for anyone who _isn’t_ like Meeran and Kortek, you mean.”

“I’m sure they’ll come around,” he said. “You know how politicians are.”

“After those negotiations on Earth?” she asked dryly. “Yes. I am intimately acquainted with the species.”

Coran chuckled, pushing open the front doors. “You know--”

A roar washed away whatever else Coran might have said, and Allura gave a start. A crowd had gathered on the slope outside of the Council Hall—Alteans, Galra, and everyone in between. There were hundreds of them. _Thousands_ , maybe, all of them crowding toward the doors. Someone at the front shouted her name, and others took up the cry.

Allura stood frozen, her mind slow to process the scene. Someone in the crowd had painted a likeness of the Red Lion, then replicated it in the other four colors. They waved the painting over their head and shouted something that was lost to the crowd’s roar.

A young Altean child, out of her toddling years but still round-faced and uncoordinated, broke away from the crowd, her mother shouting after her. She stumbled to a stop before Allura, eyes going wide, and seemed to suddenly regret her decision to come see the princess.

Smiling, Allura dropped to one knee to meet the girl’s eyes. “Hello there,” she said softly. “I’m Allura. What’s your name?”

“Rilla,” the girl said, scuffing her toes along the ground. Her dark hair hung in tight ringlets around her face, and she squeezed the folds of her lavender skirt in both hands. She looked up at Allura, blushed, and ducked her head again. “Are you a princess?”

“Rilla!” The girl’s mother grabbed her by the shoulder, then suddenly panicked as Allura looked up at her. She flushed, bobbed an awkward curtsy, and hugged Rilla to her side. “I-I’m so sorry, your highness! She didn’t know any better.”

“It’s quite all right,” Allura said, then looked back to Rilla. “I _am_ a princess. I was the princess of Altea a long, _long_ time ago, but I was asleep until very recently.”

Rilla frowned. “Why were you sleeping?”

An old ache reawakened, and Allura’s smile turned bittersweet. “Because I was in danger, and my father, King Alfor, wanted to protect me.”

Rilla’s eyes widened, and she tugged at her mother’s hand excitedly. “I know about King Alfor! Does that mean you’re the Lost Princess?”

“I suppose I am.”

A look of awe came across Rilla’s face, and she she dug into her pocket, producing a rumpled white flower, which she held out toward Allura. Rilla’s mother let out a dismayed sound, no doubt ashamed that her daughter was offering a princess such a sad-looking gift, but Allura only smiled wider.

“For me?” she asked. When Rilla nodded, Allura reached out and took the flower. She sniffed it—a delicate fragrance that reminded her of juniberries—before tucking it behind her ear.

Rilla’s eyes lit up, and she finally allowed her mother to steer her back toward the crowd. There were tears in her mother’s eyes and a grateful smile on her lips, and she bent her head to listen to Rilla’s excited babble.

Allura stood, her heart full to bursting, and surveyed the crowd. Another pair soon broke off—one Galra, one Altean, both so jittery Allura thought the Altean man might drop the tablet he carried.

“Princess Allura,” he said, bowing low. “I am Enit and this is Torva.” He gestured to the Galra woman beside him, who bowed low, her scaly skin shining in the sunlight. “Welcome to New Altea. Ah—I suppose this is a bit late for a welcome, isn’t it?”

“We hadn’t realized you had arrived,” Torva said, her voice also shaking though she maintained an outward calm better than her companion. “But there have been stories circling. Is it true you’re fighting back against Zarkon? That you came here to make an alliance?”

“It is,” Allura said. She didn’t mention the difficulties on that front—that was politics, after all. Put on a happy front for the citizens, and never let them see your uncertainty.

Enit nodded his head quickly. “We’ve heard the stories. Daring rescues, massive battles… They say you’ve never lost a fight.”

Allura glanced to Coran. “They? Who’s ‘they’?”

“I think I might have an idea.”

Allura turned to see Jana approaching with Wyn, who was grinning guiltily and rubbing the back of his head. Jana arched an eyebrow at him and shoved him forward.

He bit his lip. “I… _might_ have told a few people a few stories.”

Coran lifted a hand to cover a laugh, and Allura barely resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “I might have guessed,” she said fondly, then turned back to Enit and Torva. “A fair warning: I think it quite likely the stories you heard were exaggerations, even before they were passed around this city like a virus.”

Torva relaxed, her smile turning less brittle. “I… had suspected something of the sort, I’ll admit. I don’t think any ship in the universe could go one-on-a thousand and win.”

"Well, now, that depends." Coran twirled his moustache, a glimmer of amusement in his eye. "Is the one Voltron, and are the thousand fighters on autopilot? Because I daresay our Greens could hack that autopilot and make it a thousand and one-on-zero."

Torva's eyes widened, and Enit glanced to Allura as though asking her if Coran was serious.

Allura only smiled.

“Even so,” Enit said, drumming his fingers on his tablet. “The people of New Altea want to help.” He held the tablet out to Allura. It contained two lists of names and contact information, the first more than three hundred long, the second over a thousand. “This is a bit short notice, of course. I only saw that these were circulating this morning, so I’m sure more people would sign them if they had the chance.”

“And… what are they?”

“Volunteers,” Enit said. “The first list is people who would like to join the fight against the Galra army, if you or the Defense Division are taking recruits. The other is people who want to help out in other ways. Raising funds, spreading the word, working on your ship as mechanics or cooks or cleaners.”

A lump rose in Allura’s throat. “So many?”

“This is our fight,” Torva said solemnly. “For some, it is personal. For others, it is a duty handed down for generations. Now that you’ve returned, a lot of people are ready to answer the call. You just have to point us in the right direction.”

Allura’s eyes turned once more to the crowd. The cheers had quieted, but they still watched her with rapt attention. There was a passion burning beneath the surface of this people, a fierce desire to do right in the universe, and for the first time since arriving on New Altea, Allura felt as though she were truly looking at her own people.

“Thank you,” she said to Torva and Enit. “We haven’t quite concluded our negotiations with your High Council, but as soon as we have an agreement in place, I would be glad of your people’s support.”

* * *

Coran was not sad to be leaving New Altea behind. He’d told himself from the very beginning that it wouldn’t be home, but that hadn’t prepared him for the ache in his chest every minute he spent here, walking among the ghosts of his past.

He wasn’t sure if it was better or worse for Allura and Meri, neither of whom had spent any great length of time on Altea. Allura had been born on the castle-ship and lived there most of her life, only returning home for the occasional holiday, and Meri had traveled extensively with her parents before she started her paladin training. For both, he imagined Altea had already been something fantastical and half-glimpsed. He suspected even Altea itself would have fallen short of their expectations.

The only thing holding Coran here now was Wyn, who sat on Coran’s bed, chatting away about all the things he’d done and seen with Jana the last three days. Coran listened with half an ear as he packed, his heart aching. He told himself this was where Wyn belonged, on his own planet with his own friends and well away from the war that had stolen his innocence.

Even so, saying goodbye to him was one of the hardest things Coran had ever done.

He fastened the last catch on his bag, set it on the table by the door, and turned to Wyn, plastering a smile on his face. “Well, my boy, I suppose this is it.”

Wyn looked up sharply. “It?”

“I have to get back to the castle,” Coran said. “And I suppose you’ll want to go find Jana.”

Wyn leaped to his feet, wide-eyed, his breath catching in his throat. “You mean you’re not taking me with you?”

Coran faltered, as much for the panic in Wyn’s voice as for the question itself. “Not— _Wyn_. Don’t you want to stay here? New Altea is your home!”

“No it’s not!” Wyn stepped forward, his hands spread wide. There was a plea in his voice and an urgency Coran couldn’t understand. “You have to take me with you— _please?_ ”

Coran closed the distance between them in an instant, putting a calming hand on Wyn’s shoulder. “Of course you can come, if that’s what you really want.”

“I want to come,” Wyn whispered.

Coran pulled him into a hug. “Then you may. Are you packed?”

It took only a few minutes to gather Wyn’s sparse belongings, and then the two of them headed out, joining Meri and Allura on the way to the airfield. Matt and Keith had gone on ahead, apparently, and were waiting with Yvis when the others arrived. Thace, it seemed, would not be joining them. Keith wouldn't offer any more of an explanation than that.

“Ready?” Matt asked. He glanced at Keith, who stood off to one side, not looking at any of them. Matt frowned and fell back to walk beside him as they all set off toward the Red Lion, who sat tall and proud, towering over the other ships on the airfield. Coran walked near the rear of the group, and Matt couldn’t speak softly enough to escape Coran’s sensitive hearing.

“You doing okay?”

“Sure,” Keith said sourly. “Never better.”

There was a long silence, and then Matt said, “We don’t have to do this right now.”

Keith made a confused sound. “Do what?”

“This.” Matt huffed. “I know you don’t want to talk about… you know. And you’re worried you won’t be able to keep it out of the bond. I get it. If it would help to talk to Red, you can pilot her, and I’ll stay out of it. Otherwise I’ll fly, and I’ll make sure Red doesn’t try to go poking around in your head.”

Keith didn’t answer right away, and Coran risked a glance over his shoulder. Keith was smiling—timid and feeble, but surprisingly warm—as he leaned toward Matt, pressing their shoulders together. “No,” he said. “I think I can do it now. It’s just you.”

Matt grinned, and Coran gave them as much privacy as he could as they closed the remaining distance to the Red Lion. Keith and Matt took their places at the center of the cockpit, back to back in the two pilot’s chairs, and both closed their eyes, sinking into the paladin bond. Coran had only seen it first hand a couple of times, but the sudden anger that washed over Matt’s face was definitely new.

“She _what?_ ” Matt growled, startling the other people in the cockpit. Yvis seemed especially alarmed by the outburst, as ze probably had no idea what it meant to be dual paladins. That sort of thing couldn’t be found in the history books, and neither Coran nor Allura had seen any particular use in telling Yvis or the council about the peculiar talents of Team Voltron.

More alarming yet was the tiny ridge of flame that raced across the back of Matt’s knuckles briefly as his grip on the controls tightened. He seemed not to notice he was on fire, but Meri and Allura certainly did, Meri reaching out to smack Allura on the shoulder. Coran gave them both a knowing look.

Keith’s brow furrowed, and Matt went on scowling for a long moment before he breathed in deeply and let it out. On the exhale, the flames vanished.

“Fine,” he said. “Everyone ready?”

They didn’t wait for an answer. Red gathered herself, growled, and leaped into the sky.

* * *

The first hour of the journey passed in tense silence, Matt and Keith locked in silent conversation. Oddly, as far as Coran could tell, whatever they were discussing, it riled Matt up in direct proportion to how much it calmed Keith down. Yvis sat in the back with Allura and Meri, gesticulating wildly as ze told them all about New Altean culture, about civic infrastructure, about how the community came together to help those in need and how it was no surprise so many had volunteered to help with Voltron’s fight. Allura seemed to be listening with half an ear, a distracted smile on her face as she scrolled down the list of volunteers.

That left Wyn, who clung tight to Coran even still, as though afraid if he let go he might find himself kicked out of the Red Lion and left behind on New Altea. Coran still didn’t know why it was so important to Wyn that he return to the Castle of Lions—the only explanation he’d offered was that he’d promised Maka, one of the Galra children, that he would return.

Not that Coran was complaining, of course. Wyn made the castle-ship brighter just by being in it, and that was one place that desperately needed all the warmth it could get.

After the first hour, Matt and Keith emerged from their trance, Matt rubbing his forehead. Yvis trailed off as Meri and Allura stood and approached him, both as expectant as yelmores at last bell.

“So...” Meri asked sweetly, rising up on her toes. “How are you feeling?”

Matt looked up at them, frowning. “...Fine?”

“A little… _fiery_ , would you say?” Allura asked with a wink.

Matt’s expression didn’t change. “Allura, what are you talking about?”

Meri caught Matt’s hand in her own and waved it before his eyes. “Uh, hello? You caught your hand on fire?”

“I what, now?”

“Fire,” Meri said, enunciating carefully. “On your hand. You got pissed and suddenly, _whoosh!_ ” She dropped Matt’s hand to mime a minor explosion, which had Allura rolling her eyes.

“It wasn’t that dramatic, of course,” she said. “But you _did_ create a small flame. More to the point, you awakened your Quintessence.”

Matt’s eyes widened. “I _what?_ ”

“Not the first time, either,” Meri said. “Remember when Antok was giving us that tour and you...” She trailed off, fingers twirling in empty air. “I’m pretty sure you’re the one that busted that light.”

Matt stared down at his hand, clearly mystified by their claims. “I don’t really...”

“It would seem,” Allura said, biting down on a smile, “that meditation and inner peace are _not_ the way to connect you to your Quintessence. It obviously responds to anger; perhaps it may respond to other emotions, as well.”

“Huh.” Matt leaned back, rolling his neck to peer at Keith around the seat-back. “What kind of lame power is Heart, am I right?” he asked, grinning a grin Coran had heard the other paladins call shit-eating. Keith ducked his head, laughing softly, and Matt instantly sobered as Meri gave him a hard stare. He coughed, then undid his flight harness and joined them on the floor of the cockpit, the three of them sitting cross-legged in a small triangle. “So… Meditation time?”

“After a fashion.” Allura rested her hands, palms up, on her knees and breathed deeply. “Eventually, you should be able to manipulate your Quintessence at will, but first you need to learn to recognize the sensation. In order to do that, you need to get angry. Hopefully that will awaken your Quintessence, and you’ll be able to familiarize yourself with the feeling.”

“Okay… How do I get angry?”

Meri leaned back on her hands, smiling. “That’s easy. Just think about whatever it was you and Keith were just talking about.”

Matt glanced over his shoulder at Keith, his eyes narrowing. Almost at once, the back of his hand caught fire. He turned at Meri’s delighted laugh and yelped in shock, flailing his arm until the flames went out.

Allura stifled a laugh. “There,” she said. “Did you feel that? A tingle beneath your skin, perhaps? Or maybe you saw the currents of Quintessence moving out through your hand?”

“I… Yeah? Shit, that’s freaky.” Matt turned his hand over a few times, squinting at it as though searching for scorch marks. “I definitely saw something.”

“All right, then let’s try it again. But this time, let’s try a different emotion.”

“Like what?”

“Something strong,” Meri said. “Fear, or love, or joy. Think of the day Pidge was born, or reuniting with your mother, or your first kiss--”

Matt’s face flushed crimson, and the flames, this time, springing up at the collar of his paladin armor. He yelped, but managed to contain himself this time, twisting his head to stare at the fire, which licked at his cheek but didn’t appear to be hurting him. “Huh. Would you look at that...”

“It’s not hot?” Meri asked, leaning forward. She stretched out a hand toward the flame, then suddenly yelped, jerked back, and stuck her finger in her mouth.

“Definitely hot, I’d say.” Coran grinned in response to Meri’s pout. “But if it’s created from Matt’s Quintessence, it may recognize him as part of itself.”

“So… I’m fireproof?” Matt asked. “Cool. Think I could go all Human Torch on Zarkon’s minions?”

Meri yanked her finger out of her mouth. “ _Absolutely not._ ”

“Aww…” Matt’s shoulders slumped, but he recovered quickly, sitting up straight and leaning forward on his hands. “All right. First things first. I need to learn to do this on command.”

“And _not_ do it any time you kiss Shiro,” Meri teased. “Somehow I don’t think he’d appreciate you, ah, _heating things up in the bedroom_.”

Matt chucked his helmet at Meri, who laughed, raising her hands to shield herself as Allura rolled her eyes. “All right, you two,” she said. “Matt, try to focus on the sensation of Quintessence rising to the surface of your skin. Meri, no more teasing.” Matt stuck his tongue out, and Meri huffed, but held up her hands in surrender as Allura began to walk Matt through a mindfulness exercise. It got him nowhere, and neither did the next several attempts, but as Matt pointed out—it was thirty six hours to the edge of the defensive zone, and there was very little else to do.

“Just watch,” he said, hunching his shoulders and blowing out his cheeks in consternation. “I’ll be chucking fireballs by the time we get home.”


	4. Unity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Negotiations on New Altea were a long, agonizing process and the team's attitude wasn't helped by a trip to the military training facility, where Matt learned that New Altea may have known about CORE long before Matt escaped, and chose not to intervene. Two things saved the whole experience: a run-in with the people of New Alafor, hundreds of whom volunteered to join the Voltron Guard or otherwise support the war effort, and Matt's realization that he can, in fact, shape his own Quintessence.
> 
> The team returns to the castle-ship with a plan to prove their worth to the council of New Altea.

Matt was the first one down the ramp when the Red Lion finally docked in her hanger back on the castle-ship. Allura had barely made it to the top of the ramp before he was across the room, tripping over his own feet in his haste to share his news with the rest of the team. He planted a kiss on Shiro’s cheek, then darted past him to seize Val by the shoulders.

“Val,” he said. “ _Val._ Watch this!” He backed up, spread his hands, and snapped his fingers. As he did so, two small blue flames appeared, balanced delicately on the tip of his thumbs. (He’d been inordinately pleased with himself when he’d learned to do that, for some reason Allura couldn’t begin to fathom.)

Val’s eyes widened, and Hunk let out a sound somewhere between delight and terror. That was better than Karen fared. She’d stopped halfway to her son, all color draining from her face, and Shiro had to reach out to steady her, though he himself looked like he had a few questions he wanted to ask—just as soon as he found his voice.

“Sweet magic trick,” Akira said, leaning his elbow on Shiro’s shoulder. “Alteans have good flash paper, then?”

Shiro gave him an exasperated look, but Akira’s words seemed to have broken through his shock. “Matt?” he asked. “You want to explain?”

“Quintessential manipulation,” Matt said, letting the flames dissipate. “Magic, basically, but I guess the people who developed it, the Pygnar, considered it a regular old skill anyone could pick up, like playing the piano or fixing an engine.”

“For them, it was,” Allura said, striding across the hangar to join the others. “Their children grew up learning to shape Quintessence, and the most promising went to remote temples to train with the masters of the art. It’s not so easy for outsiders to learn.”

Pidge frowned, grabbing Matt’s hand and turning it over in search of scorch marks. There would be none, of course. He’d never managed to burn himself during their marathon training session—even despite _trying_ to, out of "pure scientific curiosity." “Why’s it harder for other people?”

“Many species don’t have the capacity to touch Quintessence,” Allura said. “I don’t understand it well myself—my father was the one who trained in the art, and even he didn’t know where the ability came from. Something in the mind, or in the spirit, perhaps. All I know is that some people could study this magic their entire lives and never made an inch of progress.”

“Even those who are able to manipulate Quintessence rarely reach the same level of power as the Pygnar,” Coran put in from the back of the group, where he stood with Keith.

Matt shrugged. “We’ve been looking into this for the last couple weeks, not knowing if it was even something I _could_ do, and we finally had a breakthrough!”

“Speaking of which, Shiro,” Meri said, grinning mischievously at Matt, “you might want to be careful about getting too feisty with Matt for the next couple weeks while he learns to control it. Just a suggestion.”

Shiro stared at Matt, who flushed and elbowed Meri in the side. “Ignore her. I’ve got it under control. Mostly.”

“Mostly isn’t particularly reassuring,” Shiro muttered, running a hand along the back of his head.

Matt rolled his eyes. “Okay, sure, but I can do _this_ now.” He clapped his hands together, grinning, and a ring of flames shot out from the point of contact, dissipating rapidly.

“Cool,” said Lance. “But… _why_? I mean, _yer a wizard_ and all that, sure. Awesome. Anyone would want that. But…”

“The crystals,” Pidge said, finally looking up from their inspection of Matt’s hands. They met his eyes, biting their lip. “That’s what it is, right? The crystals are a problem because they absorb the excess Quintessence you produce, but this magic—it’s powered by Quintessence, right?”

Val’s breath caught. “But that would mean--”

“This could be a way to manage the crystals long-term?” Matt smiled, the expression somehow fragile. Allura knew their meditation sessions had been a source of frustration for him, long days of no progress making him feel like he would never be free from what had been done to him. Now, as every time the giddiness of creating fire from his own life energy had ebbed, he seemed like he might burst into tears. “Yeah. That’s the hope.”

Pidge whooped and threw their arms around Matt while Val screamed softly into her hands. “Oh my god, you have to teach me!”

“Obviously.” Meri reached out and ruffled Val’s hair. “Now that we know it’s possible, we can work on the nitty gritty of it.”

“Is it all fire?” Val asked, energy beginning to bubble up out of her as Lance, grinning, shook her arm. “Or can it do other things?”

“Elemental expression is one of the simpler forms,” Coran said. “Alfor theorized that paladins might have an affinity for their lions’ elements. Keturah also wielded fire.” He nodded to Matt, smiling mournfully. “But it’s possible your Quintessence will tend toward water or ice.”

“ _I’m going to be a water-bender?_ ” Val squealed. “Awesome! When do we start?”

Allura folded her hands before her. “We _had_ hoped to find someone on New Altea with more expertise, or at least to discover whether the masters of Pygnar survived the last ten thousand years. I’m afraid it’s going to be slow going without a guide.”

“Hey, I’ll take slow.” Val paused, tapping her chin. “If I’m a witch, don’t I get robes? And a wand?”

Lance snorted. “There’s a slight shortage of phoenix feathers in space.”

“Dragon heartstring,” Val said. “But I see your point.”

Matt arched an eyebrow. “You have a wand picked out?”

“Obviously. Silver lime with a dragon heartstring core. And trust me, I’d be the best damn _legilimens_ you’ve ever seen.”

Pidge snickered, giving Matt a sharp poke in the ribs. “Don’t let him fool you, Val. He’d have dragon heartstring and red oak.”

“Oh, god,” Val said. “You’re _Gryffindor_ , aren’t you?”

Matt had been turned to Pidge, halfway through asking how _they_ knew what _his_ wand would be, but he whipped around, narrowing his eyes at Val. “Of _course_ I’m Gryffindor. It’s the best house.”

Val made a gagging sound. “ _Bo-ring_. It’s Slytherin all the way.”

“Hell yeah!” Pidge cried, giving Val a high five. “Well. Slytherclaw, but I’d go Slytherin if I had to choose.”

Matt shook his head. “Betrayed by my own sibling.”

Allura watched all this with bemused indulgence, though she leaned over to Meri and whispered, “I have no idea what they’re talking about.”

“Harry Potter,” Meri said. “You’ll be reading it later, trust me.”

Allura arched her eyebrow. “If you say so...”

“Anyway.” Shiro pressed his hand to Matt’s back. “That’s great news about the magic, Matt.” He turned to Allura. “How did negotiations go?”

The smile slipped from Matt’s face as he turned back toward Allura, who took a deep breath and smoothed out her expression. “It… could have been better,” she said. “We at least convinced them to give us a chance to prove ourselves.”

“ _Prove_ ourselves?” Lance crossed his arms. “What do you mean, prove ourselves? We’re the paladins of Voltron!”

Allura smiled tightly. “And the Council is wary of committing to a war they cannot win. Kolivan, the head of their military, will be here in a few days with several other planetary leaders and some pilots, who will take our place watching over Earth while we complete the test.”

“A few days?” Shay ducked her head as the other paladins turned toward her. “Forgive me, but that would be enough time for me to return home and ask my family if they could spare some healers. This Pygnarat magic may help Matt and Val—and I am glad for that, truly I am—but we do not have time to train the others. We should still find them aid, should we not?”

“She’s right,” Hunk said. “We can wormhole right there and be back tomorrow, no problem.”

Allura glanced at Shiro, who nodded. “I think that’s a splendid idea,” she said. “How soon can you leave?”

“We’re already packed,” Hunk said. “I just need to let my parents know where I’m going.” He paused, grinning. “How’s that for weird? _Hey, Mom, can I spend the night on a friend’s planet?_ ”

Lance ducked his head, snickering. “I’ve got war after school today, Mom. So I might be late for dinner.”

“Just make sure you’re home by Christmas,” Hunk shot back.

Pidge’s face darkened, but they had their back to Hunk and Lance, who went on joking, ignorant of Pidge’s mood. Matt glanced at them, and then at Karen, who looked like she was going to be sick.

Allura cleared her throat. “Yes. Well. The sooner you’re off, the better. I want you to have plenty of time on the Balmera.”

Hunk gave a sloppy salute, then he and Shay hurried out of the hangar to finish their preparations. The others refocused on the team that had been to New Altea, pressing them for more details. No one but Allura and the other Holts noticed when Pidge slipped out of the room a few minutes later.

* * *

Keith lay on his bed, staring up at the ceiling, his stomach churning. His mother’s voice echoed oddly in his ears, her words coming out of order and assaulting his feeble attempts at distraction. _Have to be ready for the opportunity,_ she’d said. _It might be the only way to set things right for us in the universe._

He held his knife—his mother’s knife—above his head and traced the rune carved into the blade.

“ _You know what this means, Keithka?”_ his mother had asked. _“It means loyalty. Hold onto this for me, Keithka. Remember me when you’re out there saving the universe.”_

Keith’s hand tightened around the hilt of the knife, and he barely resisted the urge to fling it across the room. Or better yet, into a furnace where it could be melted down so he’d never have to look at it again.

Someone knocked on his door, then opened it before Keith could decide whether or not he wanted company. “Keith?” Lance called, leaning his head into the room. “You are in here!”

Keith sighed, settling back down on his bed. “Hey, Lance. Need something?”

“Just wanted to see how you were doing. You seemed… weird, I guess.”

Keith’s throat constricted, and he turned his knife over in his hand, choosing to focus on the way the light skimmed off the blade instead of the timbre of Lance’s voice. “It’s complicated. I can’t--”

“I know,” Lance said. “Matt said you didn’t want to talk about the specifics of it, and that’s cool. I just… I guess I just wanted to know if this is the sort of thing where you need time to sort it out, or if you want some kind of distraction.”

Frowning, Keith sat up, then turned toward the door. “Distraction?”

Lance shrugged, his hands tucked behind his back. “Yeah. I mean, I know I’d rather be off laughing and having fun instead of hyperfixating on whatever’s eating me, but not everyone’s like that. So… Luz and Mateo found the pool today. I’m sure the screaming of a couple of pre-pubescent bundles of terror is enough to chase off any gloomy thoughts, if you're interested.”

A smile tugged at Keith’s lips, and he slid his knife back into its sheathe. “I don’t have a swimsuit.”

“You _what?_ ” Lance cried.

Keith felt his ears go back and reached for indignation. “I was in the _army_ , Lance! You think we had community pool or--”

Lance fluttered his hands, a bundle of blue fabric catching the light. “Nah, I’m just kidding. Here.” He tossed a pair of shorts at Keith. “I brought my other pair. I mean, have you _seen_ Altean swimsuits?” He shuddered. “I’m not gonna subject you to that, my man. Figured we’re close enough to the same size that you could use one of mine. So…?”

Keith stared at the swim trunks in his hand—light blue patterned with an odd-looking tree, bare except for a tuft of leaves at the very top. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Okay. Let me get changed.”

* * *

Coming home was strange. It had only been a few weeks since Shay had left, but it felt like ages. She had sent her parents a few messages, of course, to let them know she was well. She had not yet found a way to tell them she had become a paladin during her absence. It was a drastic change, and relaying it through text or the occasional, brief video connection stolen when their day cycles lined up and Shay for once wasn’t needed in battle…

It had seemed cruel.

That was a part of the reason she had been so insistent upon returning to her Balmera. She did care about the survivors of that awful experiment, and she _did_ intend to return with healers who might aid them. Mostly, though? She just wanted to see her family.

Hunk’s presence was a welcome distraction from the nerves that cropped up as they emerged from their wormhole a short way outside the Balmera’s atmosphere. Seeing her home from this distance was still disorienting; she had been unable to watch for long as they left, but the sight of the Balmera curled in on itself like a sleeping cavebug made her feel impossibly small. One tiny speck of life in a universe larger than all she had imagined as a youngling.

New signs of life streaked the surface in crystal hues. The plants that had begun to grow after Allura restored the Balmera’s life were thriving, a carpet of blue and crimson covering much of the rocky shell, while great glowing crystals dotted the night like human cities.

Shay’s family awaited her at the mouth of the mine shaft that had been their home and their prison for so long. A single Galra structure remained, its walls stripped bare, its foundation cracked where crystals had pushed through. Bridges, balconies, and ornamental gardens now lined the upper levels of the mine shaft, fingerling crystals affixed to the supports and strung on twine across the open space. It lent the chasm a festive feel, turning a wound into a community.

“Wow,” Hunk breathed, standing at Shay’s shoulder as she brought them down to the broad, glassy disk beside the mine shaft where the castle-ship’s engines had turned the stone hard and smooth. It wasn’t quite crystal, though it was run through with veins of blue. It reminded Shay more of the glassy black stone called obsidian she had seen in Hunk’s memories, though lighter in color. “Looks like your people have been getting along great since we were last here.”

Shay smiled, though shakily, and extended her gratitude to the Yellow Lion, who purred comfort beneath Shay’s fingertips. When Yellow’s paws touched down, the voice of the Balmera joined the symphony in Shay’s head—a deeper, richer melody, augmented by the thousands of lives contained within. Yellow’s voice rose above the rest, twining in among the harmonies, singing her greetings. Shay was left with the impression of her lion nuzzling against the Balmera, who warmed at the gesture and folded Yellow into her own.

At the glimmer of familiar voices approaching, Shay opened her eyes and found her family standing at the cliff’s edge: her parents, her grandmother Mir, and her brother.

Rax stood three paces back from the rest of the family, his arms crossed over his chest, and his gaze remained steady on the ground. Not searching for Shay, nor marveling at the lion, still a novelty to her people. He seemed… perturbed. Shay could find no better word.

Hunk’s hand came to rest on her shoulder. “You okay?”

“I am well,” Shay said, forcing a smile as she rose and moved toward the exit. “It has been some time since I left is all.”

“I get that,” Hunk said. “You weren’t there, but I kinda had a panic attack when we got to where my family was staying. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see them, just… it was a lot.”

Shay nodded. “Yes. It is a lot.”

Nevertheless, she squared her shoulders, drew in a steadying breath, and strode out to meet her family. She wore her paladin armor—as much precaution as proclamation. She was not ashamed of what she had become, but that did not stop the breath from freezing in her lungs in the moment her family caught sight of her. Rax’s eyes widened. Her mother’s hands flew up to cover her mouth. Her father took a single step forward before he stalled.

It was her grandmother who spoke first, pride in her eyes and a smile upon her lips. “Granddaughter. Shay. You did not tell us you had bonded with one of the great Lions.”

Shay ducked her head, leaning toward Hunk’s warmth. He stood half a step behind her, silent but watchful. “Yes, Grandmother. My apologies for not telling you sooner.”

“Do not fret, Granddaughter.” Mir shuffled forward, her cane clicking against the smooth stone underfoot. Age had bowed her back, but she held her head high, her eyes shining merrily. Through the Balmera beneath their bare feet, they shared in the same song. There was shock in the distance as others of Shay’s family heard the news, and Rax was a conspicuous silence in the sound, but Mir sang pure affection that softened Shay’s skin. She leaned down as Mir came within arm’s reach, pressing her forehead to her grandmother’s. “I am so proud of you, Shay.”

“Thank you.”

They remained so for a long moment, their voices blending in the communal space beneath the surface of their home. As the shock faded, Shay’s parents joined in the song, and Shay’s nerves began to unwind, her fears dissipating.

Then her brother broke his silence.

“A _paladin_?” Rax growled. “Did you push her to this, human?”

Shay pulled back from her grandmother, turning toward Rax, who glared at Hunk. Hunk blinked a few times, his lips pursed. If Shay concentrated, she could hear a faint echo of his voice in the song of the Balmera. It spoke of irritation.

“It was not Hunk, Rax,” Shay said. She rose to her full height, meeting Rax’s eyes steadily. “I chose this.”

“You— _vex_ , Shay! I knew you should not have left. This is not your fight.”

“It’s _everyone’s_ fight,” Hunk said, his voice cold. “You think Zarkon wouldn’t destroy this Balmera in a heartbeat if he got the chance?”

Rax raised his shoulders, anger injecting a discordant note into the song. “You took my sister away and turned her into a soldier,” he seethed. “You have _no_ right to speak of destruction as though you do not commit the same crimes.”

“Rax,” Shay’s father said, dismay thrumming in his song.

Shay placed a hand on his shoulder and stepped forward, standing toe-to-toe with Rax. “This was _my_ choice, and mine alone. The Yellow Lion offered me her bond, Hunk and the other paladins welcomed me as one of their own, but none of them would have compelled me to fight had I not first volunteered.”

“And what choice did you have, out there alone with the skylings? You should be here, with your own people.”

She scoffed. “We are at _war_ , Rax. For every day I sit by doing nothing, another planet suffers the same injustices as did we. How can I hide, knowing I have in me the power to change this universe for the better?”

Rax fell silent, glancing away in a clear sign that he was through discussing the matter, but his song remained as volatile as ever. More so than when they had begun, perhaps. His song spoke of anger and fear, and though Shay understood his desire to see her safe, she could not stop the indignation that rose at his scorn.

“You have a Meet to attend,” Rax said, turning away. “We will speak on this when you are done.”

Hunk made a discontented sound, his face and his song suggesting anger. Shay pressed her shoulder to his, filling her song with comfort. She was not sure he could hear her, distant as his song was, but he seemed to understand she wished him to let Rax go. One hot temper was enough for any conversation, and Shay suspected Hunk’s outward calm would not last long were he and Rax allowed to rile each other up.

Shay waited until Rax had reached the staircase that led down into the mine shaft, then turned to her grandmother. “The other Elders are gathered, then?”

“I sent word when you first contacted us,” Mir said. “The last of them will arrive before the day is out. In the mean time, one of your agemates declares Unity today. If we hurry, we ought to make it before they begin.”

* * *

Matt was looking for Pidge. Their mother, too, probably, but she didn’t have a lion screaming at Green, who relayed those screams to Pidge, who was just trying to _not_ think about their family.

_She’s having trouble adjusting. That’s not a crime._

Matt’s words hadn’t stopped replaying in Pidge’s head since he left for New Altea. It kept them up at night, filled the awkward silence that sprouted up every time they were alone with their mother. They were a paladin—they _were,_  damn it. They were young, the universe had no right to demand their life, but it _had._  Pidge was here, they’d fought and killed and nearly _been_ killed. None of that was right. Sometimes they had dreams that none of this had ever happened, that they were still back home with Matt and their parents, and the Kerberos mission hadn’t ended in disaster.

But forcing Pidge out of the fight now that everyone they cared about was involved? That didn’t fix anything.

“I’m not even _that_ young,” Pidge muttered. They were sequestered away in the maintenance space at the heart of the Green Lion—the one place they’d found that not only kept the others from physically cornering them, but also stopped Green from putting through a call from the comms station on the bridge. (Green, _apparently_ , thought Pidge should talk to their mother. Pidge thought Green should mind her own fucking business.)

Green growled a warning, prodding at Pidge with a wordless reprimand.

They wrinkled their nose. “I looked it up, you know. All those treaties and laws and shit? Most of them say eighteen now, sure, but it used to be fifteen. Did you know that? Fifteen. I’ll be fifteen in less than half a year!”

 _**Half a year is not now,** _ Green noted.

Pidge looked up from their laptop to glare at the veins of Quintessence running through Green’s machinery. “Yeah, but it’s not like no one under eighteen can ever make it into any army ever. You know how many kids my age fought in the World Wars? _Twelve_ -year-olds fought in the World Wars! It happens all the time.”

_**It happens. Does that make it right?** _

“What does it _matter_ if it’s right? Okay, sure, yeah, don’t let the military recruit kids my age—except, oh, wait! The Garrison goes into high schools and talks to kids my age about joining up. They _say_ it’s for the exploration and science and whatever, but come _on._ You don’t go to the Garrison without learning how to fight, and if war breaks out, whoops! Guess we’re soldiers now! And of course Mom didn’t have a problem with it _then_. It’s only when I’m doing something that actually _matters_ that she wants to lock me in the house and never let me leave.”

Pidge cursed, scrubbing at eyes that were trying to tear up.

“But it’s _different_ when it’s an army. Armies can recruit anyone they want. Kids who join the military are filling a spot most adults could fill just as easily. _We’re_ not an army. _We’re_ just trying to survive.”

For a long moment, the Green Lion was silent, her engines idling with a thrum like a distant purr. Her voice, when she finally spoke, was hardly more than a whisper.

_**I am sorry.** _

“For _what?_ ” Pidge asked.

_**Choosing you. I am sorry for choosing you.** _

Pidge’s tears spilled over, and they cursed, shoving their laptop away as they pulled up their hoodie to catch the tears before they left telltale marks on their face. What were they even crying for? Being forced to fight? Being guilt-tripped into stepping down? The simple fact that they didn’t _know_ what they wanted anymore, except to not have to watch anyone else get hurt? “Do you regret it?” they asked, dreading the answer Green would give.

She answered with a mental gesture Pidge could only describe as a hug. _**Yes. I wish it had not been necessary. If things had been different…** _

“If things had been different, _what?_ ” Pidge demanded. “If things had been different, you wouldn’t have chosen me?”

 _**Later.** _ Green purred, the sound rumbling like thunder in the metal all around Pidge. _**You are my paladin. You always will be. But I wish this had not happened when you were so young.** _

The words struck a chord in Pidge, and they buried their face in their knees, leaning into Green’s psychic hug. “Me too,” they admitted.

Green had no more words of wisdom to offer, no advice on what Pidge was supposed to do now. The suggestion that they talk to their mother lurked in the back of their mind, as always, a whisper from Green that for now, at least, didn’t make it far enough to be called a demand. It still prickled, and they shrank away from the reminder of how messed up their family was.

 _I can’t talk to her now, Green,_ Pidge thought, opening up their mind for Green to hear. _If I go into it not knowing what I want and then I agree to do what Mom wants, I’m only going to regret it later._

Green didn’t answer.

Pidge supposed that was for the best. This was a decision they had to make for themself. Their mother couldn't make it for them, Green couldn't make it for them... As much as some quiet corner of them wished somebody would snap their fingers and take away this impossible choice, that wasn't going to happen.

Pidge sighed, reaching out for their laptop. They weren't getting anywhere with their personal issues today, they knew that much, but that didn't mean they had to waste the day entirely. Dozens of files sat open on their desktop, waiting for review. They’d been through hundreds already in the last few days, pouring over every record they’d ever pulled out of a Galra computer in search of even the smallest reference to their father’s fate. So far they’d found nothing, but it was the only thing they’d found that kept their mind off thoughts of what would happen if their mother succeeded in forcing them out of the war, of whether they even belonged on this team at all.

“I’m not finding anything, girl,” they said, forcing cheer into their voice and ignoring the tears that still occasionally slipped down their face. “Maybe I’ll swing by the memory cores after dinner tonight. See if Sa has any ideas?”

Green rumbled. Her awareness pressed for another achingly long moment at the doubts tumbling through Pidge’s head, then blessedly left it alone. _**He would like that,** _ she said.

Pidge nodded, pulling up the next file on their list. Dinner was still a few hours away; they might as well plow through this last bit until then.

* * *

“So what is this _unity_ thing, anyway?” Hunk asked in an undertone as he, Shay, and her family headed deeper into the cave system beneath the Balmera’s surface. The tunnels were brighter than the last time Hunk had seen them, young crystals poking out here and there to add their light, decorations hung from the ceiling. He wondered if there was some sort of festival happening, or if this was just the new normal.

He liked it. Made the place feel less like the prison it had been when the Galra were here.

“It is...” Shay hesitated, her brow furrowing. “I know not how to explain it. A joining? A joining between two people. A promise, and a celebration. They were few under the Galra, and not as elaborate as they once were. I have only borne witness to one other.”

Hunk considered that. “So… like a wedding?”

“…Wedding?” Shay looked at him, and Hunk could have sworn he felt a twinge of confusion from her. It was like being in Yellow, only much weaker. The edges of his mind… _fuzzed_ , like a radio station that kept fading, letting another station bleed through.

It was Hunk’s turn to hesitate. “A wedding… well, I guess it’s also a joining between two people. Specifically, two people who are in love and usually have been dating for a while.” The back of his neck grew flushed, and he avoided looking at Shay as he continued. “Sometimes, if they decide they want to stay together forever—or, well, not always forever, but let’s not get into divorce right now—they’ll get married. It looks different for different couples, but I guess the ‘traditional’ thing is to move in together, share all the chores and money stuff, eventually have kids and raise ‘em...” He shrugged. “That feels like it’s simplifying it a lot, but yeah. When people get married, they have a wedding to celebrate. Sometimes they do. You can get married at the courthouse, and it’s cheaper, but a lot of people like to have their family and friends there when they make it official.”

Shay giggled. “It sounds confusing.”

“It is, I guess,” Hunk said. “It’s pretty common on Earth though. More than _pretty common,_ really. Like, ‘people assume everyone’s going to do it eventually’-common. Like, ‘some people do it more than once and no one bats an eye’-common. I’ve never had to explain the concept before.”

“Well.” Shay turned toward him, her head tipped to one side. “A Unity is similar to this ‘married’ of yours, but it is less common, I think. And it has little to do with reproduction. My grandparents are heart-mates, but my parents are not.”

“Heart-mates _?_ ” Hunk asked.

“Ones who have declared Unity,” Shay explained. “One of my mother’s agemates is heart-mates with her sister, though, and I do not think our worlds are so different that you would ‘get married’ with a sibling?”

Hunk shook his head emphatically. “No. Nope. Definitely not. Not every married couple has kids, or even _can_ have kids—Mom needed a sperm donor to have me; I’m not genetically related to my Mama—but, like… it’s a _thing._ ” He glanced ahead, to where Shay’s parents and grandmother were engaged in a quiet conversation, and decided he wasn’t going to get involved in a conversation about sex right now, even if he could be sure that it wouldn’t necessitate laying out for Shay the complicated mess that was human models of attraction.

What _was_ the Balmeran model, anyway? Did they use the split attraction model? Did they differentiate orientations based on what genders you had a thing for? Or did they not feel the need to label it at all? Alteans didn’t, apparently. Coran found the notion of gender-based orientations as baffling as an orientation based on height, or hair color, or which sock you put on first.

Well, he could have that talk with Shay later, preferably when they were alone so no one else had to witness Hunk’s mortification as he tried to make sex ed not awkward. For now it was enough to know that he was going to something like a wedding, but not necessarily for a romantic couple.

It took a long time to get where they were going, which evidently was the center of the Balmera. Hunk had been here on his first visit, but it was no less awe-inspiring this time: an enormous crystal the size of a small apartment building sprouting from the ceiling of the chamber, its light casting shifting shadows on the walls.

Balmerans stood around the edges of the room, looking on in reverent silence as the two at the center knelt before the crystal. Hunk glanced around, confused; nothing seemed to be happening, but everyone was watching attentively—waiting for something?

No. Listening. Most of the crowd had a hand pressed to the wall beside them. A faint glow Hunk now recognized as Quintessence lit the stone where they touched it, much the way Shay’s hands glowed when she pressed them to the smooth metal panel she used in place of traditional controls when she flew Yellow. Shay said that was a way for her to talk to the lion, so maybe this was the Balmeran equivalent of a microphone and speakers?

Curious, Hunk pressed his hand to wall beside Shay’s and closed his eyes. He wasn’t sure what he was listening for, but… there _was_ something there. A voice, only not. Several voices. It sounded at first like the indistinct murmur of a crowd, but the longer he listened the more the sound seemed to change. It was the echo of the ocean inside a conch shell, an orchestra warming up before a concert, the song of a family of birds chattering in a language no one else could understand.

It _was_ a song. Hunk was fairly sure of that, though he couldn’t pick out a melody line, much less identify the instruments lending their voices.

The Balmera song.

He’d caught a glimpse of it in the paladin bond; Yellow had adapted her voice when she bonded with Shay, and sometimes when he was so deep in the bond he lost track of the boundary between him and Yellow, Hunk caught himself humming to a tune he could never remember.

He’d never heard the original, though. This wasn’t the Balmera song as it was meant to be heard; he knew that. This was a bad cell phone recording of a masterpiece. But it still reached down deep inside him and plucked at his soul. He felt honored beyond words to be granted even this imperfect glimpse at the majestic creature’s inner life.

He let the song wash over him as the ceremony progressed. Sometimes, he thought he could almost pick out an individual voice among the harmonies, but the meaning was lost on him. He supposed, this not being an audible sound, the translator didn’t help him here.

He caught the emotions, though—joy and fondness and nostalgia, all wrapped up together with something bittersweet. The emotions crested when the couple stood and stepped forward together to press their hands to the central crystal. For a moment, the song stilled, replaced instead by an image—a flash of movement, of someone else standing in this chamber, pressing reverent hands to this crystal.

It was gone too fast for Hunk to pick out any more details, but it left him breathless, his eyes stinging with nameless emotion.

Shay grabbed his hand as the gathering dispersed, some Balmerans going to congratulate the new heart-mates, others leaving through the tunnels that led back to the surface. Mir had already crossed to a different tunnel, smaller and quieter than the ones thronged with laughing Balmerans.

“Grandmother says the other Elders have arrived,” she whispered. “It is time for the Meet.”

* * *

The pool was not quite what Keith was expecting. Lance could see it on his face—the way he stopped just outside the elevator doors, his head tipping back. Mateo, Luz, and Lance’s father bobbed in the pool on the ceiling, shouting and waving their hands at the new arrivals. Luz in particular seemed delighted to find Keith there, a towel draped around his shoulders and Lance’s swim trunks slung low on his hips.

Lance didn’t let himself stare too long at that particular sight. As Mateo and Luz started competing to splash water higher above the surface—they’d discovered if they splashed high enough they could actually make the gravity on the other half of the room catch the droplets, wetting what they’d agreed to call the lower floor—Lance grabbed Keith by the wrist and dragged him across the room to the second elevator.

He hadn’t noticed it the first time he’d been in the room. The first several, really, and he was more than a little bit miffed that Mateo had discovered it almost at once upon entering the pool area.

The elevator was relatively small; small enough that squeezing in with Luz, Mateo, and their father, Ramon, had made things a bit uncomfortable. There was more room now, with just the two of them, but Lance was keenly aware of the narrow distance between them. Keith’s fur tickled the skin of Lance’s bare arm, and when the elevator started moving (a peculiar, sideways motion that felt a little bit like being clotheslined), Lance shamelessly snaked out his arm to steady Keith before he toppled.

Their eyes met, and Keith flicked his ear once.

Lance grinned. “Sorry. Did I forget to mention? You’ve gotta watch your footing in here.”

Keith snorted, but pulled away as the elevator slowed to a stop, having effectively flipped them upside down. This was the third time Lance had taken this ride, and he still couldn’t pinpoint exactly where the gravity flipped itself on its head. All he knew was that when he stepped out of the elevator a half a second behind Keith, he was standing on the top floor (what he’d originally, mistakenly, perceived as the ceiling.)

“Keith!” Luz squealed, lifting herself up on the edge of the pool. She waved, and in doing so lost her leverage and dipped back into the water. She spluttered through her next few words, swiped at her eyes, and waved again. “Are you going to swim with us?”

Keith hesitated. “I, uh...”

Lance elbowed him in the side. “Let’s start simple, mullet. Do you know how to swim?”

“Yeah. More or less.” Keith shrugged, steadfastly avoiding Lance’s eyes. “I’m not exactly going to win any races, but I know how to not drown. That much was part of basic training.”

“Good enough for me,” Lance said, then grabbed Keith’s arm in both hands and towed him toward the edge of the pool at a sprint.”

“Hey!” Lance’s dad called. “No run--”

Lance whooped as he leaped off the edge, Keith yelling and flailing behind him. Lance lost his hold on him somewhere between hitting the water and coming up for air, and when he turned around, it was to find Keith doing an admirable impression of a sodden cat.

“Wh-what the— _vrekt?_ ” Keith’s teeth chattered as he spoke, his ears pressed flat against his head. He looked unfairly adorable like that, and Lance had to bite his lip to keep from laughing in his face.

“The answer is yes, Luz,” Lance said, turning to grin at her. “Keith is swimming with us.”

Keith scowled, but Lance was spared what surely would have been a scathing retort as Luz screamed and locked her arms around Keith’s neck. They wobbled, Keith’s eyes going wide, and Lance flipped onto his back, drifting lazily as Keith wrangled a ten-year-old.

“Luz,” Ramon warned. “Let him breathe.”

Luz grumbled, but reluctantly dropped down off Keith’s shoulders and swam around in front of him, staring up at him with her head cocked to one side.

“Does it feel weird to get your fur wet? How long does it take you to dry? Does chlorine make your fur feel funny? It makes my hair feel all gross and dry. Is this a chlorine pool? We went to my friend’s house once, and she has a salt water pool. It was like swimming in the ocean!”

“Uh...” Keith blinked, staring down at Luz like she was speaking another language. “I don’t think I’ve ever been to the ocean.”

Luz’s eyes widened. “You _haven’t_? Dad! Can we take Keith to the ocean when we get home?”

Ramon looked at Lance, fondness mingling with exasperation. “I don’t know when that’s going to be, sweetheart. We’ll see.”

Luz rolled her eyes, and her whole body followed suit. She latched onto Keith’s arm to keep herself from flopping over entirely, but it was a near thing. “ _Fine._ ” She looked at Keith with narrowed eyes and dropped her voice low. “I’ll make sure you get to the ocean some day, don’t worry.”

“Thank you…?”

Lance pushed off the wall, grinning, and skimmed across the water to where Keith stood. The water here only came up to his chest, but Lance let himself soak in it, reveling in the feel of the water flowing through his hair. “Having fun?” he asked sweetly.

“I guess so.” Keith twisted to look at Luz, who still clung to his arm, her feet braced against his thigh. She was bent over backwards so just the crown of her head touched the water, her hair fanning out around her. “So… what do you _do_ in a pool?”

“Just… have fun?” Lance suggested. “Swim around? Have water fights?”

Keith looked at him, a dangerous spark in his eye. “Water fights?”

“Not like that, mullet.” Lance slapped the water, sending up a spray that caught Keith full in the face. He spluttered, ear twitching and flicking off water, and Lance dropped down, hiding his smile beneath the water.

“Real mature, Lance,” he grumbled.

Lance backed away, sucking in a mouthful of water, and when Keith came trundling after him, he popped his head up above the surface and shot the water through his teeth at Keith, who froze, a look of utter shock on his face.

Lance cackled and darted away before Keith could retaliate. Behind him, he heard Luz shouting for Keith to attack and Keith, grunting in confusion, giving chase.

“Mateo!” Lance cried. “Battle stations! I need backup!”

Mateo popped up in the deep end of the pool, where he’d been diving for quarters, shook his head, and looked past Lance to Keith and Luz. A wicked grin came over him, and he swam for the side of the pool, where they’d left the kickboards and pool floaties—excellent tools for making waves and moving water.

Lance had taught his little brother well.

Somewhere at the far end of the pool, he heard his father sigh. “Careful! I don’t want our first experience with alien medical technology to happen before we’ve even left orbit!”

“Don’t worry, Dad,” Lance called. “No one’s gonna get hurt. Except maybe Keith.”

“Wanna bet?”

The words came from close behind Lance—far closer than he’d been anticipating. He put on a burst of speed, but Keith leaped on him, plunging them both beneath the surface. Lance came up coughing, his nostrils burning, and laughed in delight.

“Mateo!” he screamed, kicking desperately as Keith held on, his claws tickling Lance’s ribs. “Mayday! _Mayday!_ Get him off me!”

Keith laughed once, cocky enough that Lance would have liked to knock the stupid, self-satisfied smirk right off his face—if he’d been able to aim straight with all the laughter and the splashing water. “What’s the matter, Lance? Need your kid brother to fight your battles for you?”

Mateo, having climbed out of the water, bellowed a challenge as he charged forward and leaped, tucking his legs in a cannonball. His aim was impeccable, as always—close enough that Keith backpedaled, releasing Lance in the process, but not so close as to actually hit anybody.

Mateo came up grinning, and Lance gave him a high five as Keith regrouped with Luz. “Ready for this, Mateo?” Lance asked.

Mateo grinned, dropping low in the water. “ _They’re going down._ ”

* * *

“Earth needs our help,” Shay said, cringing as her voice wavered. She had thought—hoped—that she was beyond the worst of that, as she had somewhat found her footing in outlining the situation for the gathered Elders, but now that she was beyond simple fact, she found her nerves rising again. She glanced to her Grandmother, who had remained silent throughout the Meet, except at the very start, when she had introduced Shay and gestured for her to step into the ring.

Even now, Mir offered nothing but a smile and a small wave of her arm that seemed to say, _Go on, child._

Shay swallowed, clasping her hands against her stomach and turning to the wizened faces staring back at her. “I know that our people have suffered greatly under the rule of the Empire, and Princess Allura wishes you to know that she will continue to protect our home and our people regardless of our answer here.”

Someone coughed, and Shay faltered, biting her lip. What was she doing here, standing at the forefront of the Meet as though _she_ were Elder for her circle? It was nearly too great an honor to be allowed to attend the Meet; she had not imagined she would be permitted to speak beyond perhaps a brief summary of Project Balmera and its effects on the human prisoners. But it seemed her grandmother had planned otherwise.

“I come,” Shay said, wetting her lips, “not as a paladin of Voltron, but as a Balmeran. I was here when Voltron came to our aid. I remember what they risked for us, and I cherish the countless lives they saved. You all already know my answer; I left my home to care for Matthew Holt, who survived an earlier stage of these experiments. I will continue to stand alongside the other paladins, but I cannot help every survivor on my own.

“So I ask, if any of your kinsmen are willing, that you send a small team of healers to Earth to help until we can find a permanent solution. Five of the paladins call this planet home, so it will be as well protected as anywhere can be. I cannot promise those who go will be safe, but we will defend them— _I_ will defend them to the limits of my ability.”

She opened her mouth to say more, only to find that she had run out of words. How long had she been talking? An hour? Longer? The minutes blurred together into a haze of anxiety and self-doubt, and she glanced once more to her grandmother, this time for permission to step back to the edge of the stone ring, where Hunk waited with the Elders.

Mir nodded, and Shay released the breath she had been holding on and off throughout the meeting. She suspected her speech would have been more impressive had she not given it all while sounding as though she had run the circumference of the Balmera to get here, but what help was there for that? She had not been given time to prepare.

“You did well, child,” Mir whispered as Shay returned to her side. The praise warmed Shay, but only for a moment. As soon as she turned back toward the Elders, her nerves returned in force, and she lifted her hands to her throat, trying to fight down the nausea rising within her.

Hunk’s hand pressed against the small of her back, and she smiled shakily at him.

After a moment, one of the Elders stepped forward. Kann, she thought. Of a family located two chasms south of Shay’s own. He bowed his head respectfully toward—toward _Shay._  That was… that was _not_ how these things happened. She was no one of any note, just a young woman only a bit beyond her youngling years, whose sole distinction was being the granddaughter of an Elder. She wanted to protest the show of respect, but Kann spoke before she could gather her wits.

“We well remember the valor of the Voltron Paladins,” he said, his voice a low rumble. He was one of the younger Elders, perhaps the same age as Shay’s parents and only just beginning to show the cracks in his rough skin. He bowed his head to Hunk, who flushed, smiling sheepishly. “I have spoken with the healers of my circle, and they are all in agreement. We will aid the humans in any way we can. Three of my healers have offered themselves to your service.”

Kann stepped back into line and another Elder, Ver, took his place. “We, too, offer our aid,” she said. “Two of my healers have submitted their names.”

One by one the remaining Elders stepped forward, each of them citing the number of healers who had answered Shay’s request. The smaller circles—those that included only a small handful of families—could offer only one or two apiece, but others named four or even five. The circle Mir was Elder over, which included some twenty families, offered eleven healers. In total, the thirty Elders named nearly one hundred healers who had offered their services, many times more than what Shay had asked.

Too overwhelmed to form a proper thank-you, Shay glanced to her grandmother, who smiled and stepped forward once more.

“My thanks to you, Elders of our people,” she said. “Your selflessness speaks well of you all. The paladins and I will discuss the matter and reach back to those we decide to take.” She touched the knuckles of her right hand to her forehead, and the other Elders mimicked the gesture, murmuring their farewells before retreating out the disparate tunnels that would take them each back to their home regions.

Shay lingered, along with Hunk and Mir, who turned to Shay once the others had all left. “So,” Mir said, settling down on one of the round, flat stones that ringed the chamber. “We have a surplus. How shall we determine which healers to send to Earth?”

Shay’s veins ran with ice. “Why do you ask _me_? I am not an Elder, Grandmother. I should not be the one making decisions such as these.”

“Oh?” Mir tilted her head to the side, setting the butt of her cane against the floor before her and resting both hands atop it. “And will I live forever, youngling?”

Shay’s breath caught in her throat.

Mir’s expression softened. “I am not dying yet, my child,” she said. “But I am old. It is time for me to consider who it is who shall replace me.”

“And… you want _me_?” Shay shook her head, her voice shaking. “Grandmother, this is a mistake. I am not--”

“Not what? Not strong? You left home with the Voltron Paladins because of your convictions. Not wise? You trusted the skylings before any of us, and it was that trust that ultimately freed us. Or perhaps you are not a leader. _You_ , who lead us all in the fight for the good of the universe.” Mir reached out with her cane, tapping the yellow V on Shay’s chest. “You are more than you think, child. There is no other I would rather have succeed me.”

Shay felt her skin growing warm with the praise, and she ducked her head. She could think of no way to deny her grandmother’s words, so though she still thought it absurd that anyone might consider _her_ as a one-day Elder, she focused her mind on the problem Mir had set before her.

“We should not take the healers from the smallest circles,” she said slowly. “They have already lost much, and may not be able to spare even a single healer.”

Mir nodded. “A wise observation. What else?”

“Well...” Shay hesitated. “Have any of the volunteers experience in treating crystal sickness like this? You knew how to approach it; might some of the others, as well?”

“Yes, in fact. I recognize a dozen names on the lists the other Elders gave me.”

Clasping her hands tight, Shay nodded. “Then we should choose from among them, and have the rest train more healers in the art, in case we find other victims of the Empire’s experiments. And we should tell all the elders that their offers are appreciated. There may come a day where more healers are needed, so those who are truly ready to assist in the war effort, especially if they would be willing to treat wounded soldiers, should be ready if we put out another call for aid.”

Mir’s smile only grew, and Shay dropped her gaze, feeling self-conscious.

“You have a good heart, child,” Mir said. “And a steady mind. You will make a fine Elder when I am gone. For now, I will pass our decision along. You should get some rest. I will tell those who will go with you to Earth to be ready in the morning.”

* * *

“Hey, Lance?”

Lance turned, wiping his hair out of his eyes. “Yeah?” He lay with Keith on the edge of the pool, their feet dangling in the water. The water fight had been ruled a tie on account of Luz’s heel catching Mateo in the eye.

They were both fine, of course. In fact, Mateo had been more insistent than anyone that the fight go on, mostly because Luz and Keith had had the upper hand (and most of the pool toys) at that point, but their father had been firm in his decision.

Lance was glad for the rest, honestly. His muscles burned with the workout, and though his breathing had slowed to something near normal, his heart still pounded in his chest.

That might have had something to do with the way he lay scant inches from Keith, their arms pressed together from shoulder to fingertip.

Keith turned, propping his head up on his hand, and met Lance’s eyes for a brief moment before turning instead to watch Luz and Mateo, who were attempting to create a whirlpool and not having much luck.

“Do you think I’m a good person?"

Lance sat up, frowning, and stared at the top of Keith’s head. “What sort of question is that?”

Keith shrugged, an awkward gesture, considering his position half reclined on the tile. “I dunno. Just… something I’ve been thinking about.”

There was a story there, one Lance could only assume had to do with whatever had happened on New Altea. Matt hadn’t said much, but Lance suspected it had something to do with Keith’s mother, and he had to wonder what the hell she’d said or done to trigger this.

Shaking his head, Lance reached over and flicked Keith’s forehead, startling him into looking up. Their eyes locked, and Lance felt his temperature rise.

He looked away, clearing his throat. “Of _course_ you’re a good person, idiot. Anyone who tells you otherwise either doesn’t know you or is a complete asshole. Either way, you shouldn’t give them the satisfaction of listening to them.”

“No one said anything like that,” Keith said. “And you don't know the things I've done. The things I did in the Galra army.” He huffed, hurrying on before Lance could find his voice. “Look, it's nothing. My mom just asked me to do something, and I’m trying to figure out why she thought it was something I was capable of.”

Lance watched him pluck at his claws for a long moment, then sighed and laid back down beside him. “Maybe she was thinking it was something _she’d_ do, and she just assumed you’d be the same. In which case, it’s her problem, not yours.”

“You think?”

Lance turned and looked at him, then reached up and grabbed his hand, stopping him as he tore at a hangnail that was already starting to bleed. "I think you’re one of the best, most selfless people I know, whatever you did or didn't do to survive in Zarkon's army, and if you’re mom’s asking you to do something you aren’t comfortable with, then you don’t owe her jack squat.”

Keith stared at their hands for a long moment, until Lance's embarrassment got the better of him and he started to pull away. Keith moved quicker and folded his other hand over the top of Lance’s.

He smiled, the gentle slope of his ears making Lance’s heart do a quick-step. “Thanks, Lance. That means a lot.”

“Uh—sure.” Lance cleared his throat and turned his eyes to the ceiling, watching the water’s reflections dance across the room. “Any time.” He made no move to pull his hand away.

* * *

Rax found Shay later that night, after she had parted ways with Hunk and gone to find rest.

“Grandmother has named you heir,” he said.

Shay nodded, her mouth dry. “So she said after the Meet.”

Rax’s eyes narrowed, taking in every inch of her. “And still you would leave us? Go off with the skylings to the war?”

“Rax,” she said, surprised at his belligerent tone. “You know I must. I cannot leave my friends to fight this war alone.”

“That is an _excuse_ , Shay. Vex! Do you think of no one but yourself?”

“Of course I--”

“Your people need you, Shay! _I_ need you.” Rax balled his hands into fists, his voice rising to near a shout. The song darkened around them as neighbors heard Rax’s anger and shied away. “If you mean to lead us one day, you should stay—or are you too good for this life? Is that it? You are a paladin now, built for greater things than a humble existence on the Balmera that gave you life?”

Shay curled in on herself, an ache building in her chest. She knew it radiated out of her, plain for all to hear in the song, but she could not hold it in. “That is not it at all, Rax. I only--”

“You only _what_ , Shay?”

“Okay, that’s enough.” Suddenly Hunk was there, standing between Shay and her brother, whose anger echoed in the walls, an accusation that hit Shay from all sides. She took a step back, pressing her hands to her earslits as Hunk put his hand on Rax’s chest and forced him back. “You need to back off, man.”

Rax’s lip pulled back in a snarl. “Or what? You will fight me?”

“It’s tempting,” Hunk said. His expression was a thunderhead, his distant song a predator’s cry. Even Rax seemed to hear it, and his defiance wavered for just a moment before he regained his footing and pushed back against Hunk’s hand.

“She is my sister, skyling. Do not involve yourself in matters beyond you.”

Hunk’s lips pressed together. “How about you don’t go around being an asshole to your own family, and then I won’t have to get involved? How’s that sound?”

“Hunk,” Shay said in a small voice. “It is fine. You don’t need to…To...”

Hunk looked over his shoulder at her, his expression softening. To Rax, he said, “Yeah, okay, no. I’m not doing this tonight. It’s been a long day, and you need to cool off or _something._ So just—just walk away, Rax. We can try this again in the morning if you think you can be civil about it.”

Rax stared him down for such a long time Shay was sure it would come to blows. Hunk didn’t bend, and there was no trace of his usual smile, just a hard set to his jaw and simmering anger in his eyes.

At length, Rax backed down, muttering under his breath as he turned to go.

Hunk turned to Shay. “Are you okay?”

“I am well.” Shay forced a smile, wiping her eyes. “It is late, and we should rest. Tomorrow will come early.” She pushed aside the curtain that partitioned her room from the tunnel and stepped inside, holding her breath until Hunk walked away, back to the room around the corner that had been set aside for him.

Then, shaking, she lay down and reached out to the Balmera, hoping its song might lull her to sleep.

In the morning, when the healers gathered at the Yellow Lion and Shay said her farewells to her family, she kept scanning the crowd for signs of her brother, hoping he might appear to make amends before she left.

He did not show.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Psst. You should hop on over to Tumblr for a [bonus post](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/166725419959/to-go-along-with-tonights-chapter-i-present-to) looking at the other humans' wand choices, because wand lore is fun and I got a little bit carried away.


	5. The Red Swiftling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The Red Lion returned from New Altea with word of a test--and of magic that might help Matt and Val manage their crystals. While waiting for Kolivan and the other Councilors to arrive, Hunk and Shay returned to Shay's Balmera seeking healers for the other survivors of Project Balmera. They secured the aid they needed, but Shay and her brother Rax argued about duty and loyalty and parted ways on a sour note.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my goodness, I've been spoiled rotten by art this weekend!
> 
> Malaayna drew an epic Matt Holt wreathed in flames ([here](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/166918378144/malaayna-dualityverse-matt-holt-is-such-a))
> 
> And niyalune did two edits: one of the team [at the beginning of the series](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/166918771304/niyalune-heres-my-second-edit-for-squirenonnys) and one of [all the paladins together](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/166918709329/niyalune-over-the-course-of-3-days-ive). (You can also view these edits on AO3, [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12548560) if you're not on Tumblr.)
> 
> Thank you both so much! I'm still screaming inside. <3

Meri turned a corner to the sight of Lealle’s AI hologram and almost had a heart attack. She froze, staring at a face that had once been as familiar as Allura’s, her heart in her throat, and resisted the ridiculous urge to run.

“Meri!” Lealle’s face split into a grin at the sight of her, and if that face hadn’t been made up of blue-tinted light, Meri would have said Lealle was about to cry. She glided forward in that peculiar way holograms had, her legs moving in a perfect replica of her usual gait but her forward motion too uniform to be natural. She stopped just out of arm’s reach and wrapped her arms around herself, smiling feebly. “Allura told me she’d found you.”

Meri tried to smile in return—she _did._ But Lealle’s face wasn’t meant to look so perfect and smooth, her voice falling short of the booming, boisterous shout that used to greet Meri from the far end of a corridor. “Yeah,” Meri said weakly. “Cryopods, huh?”

It was a pathetic attempt at conversation, but Meri couldn’t bring herself to do better. She should have protested when Coran said he was thinking about allowing the AIs to roam the castle freely. They’d been confined to the computer core until now, as the reminder of those who had died was too fresh. But with Meri’s return and the discovery of New Altea, Allura and Coran were finally beginning to heal. And the previous paladins _did_ have a wealth of knowledge that might be useful for this new generation.

So, really, how could Meri say no? She’d had her time to mourn. It was time to move on.

Still, there was a lump in her throat and a pressure building behind her eyes as the silence swelled between them. Meri had left her parents behind when she came to the castle, and Lealle had stepped in as much as Coran, offering Meri a shoulder to cry on, an encouraging word—everything she was missing all alone in a strange place.

Meri couldn’t help feeling as though she’d let Lealle down. Alfor was dead, Altea no longer existed, and Meri hadn’t even managed to be there for Allura when she needed her.

“You’ve been doing okay, then?”

Meri shrugged. “Fine, I guess. Listen, Coran wanted me to—uh—help out with some repairs, so I’m just gonna...” She trailed off, mouth running dry at the achingly familiar sympathy on Lealle’s face. Meri never had been able to lie to her.

“Go on,” Lealle said, stepping back. “I’ll be here whenever you’re ready.”

The fact that she knew Meri couldn’t stand the sight of her—the fact that she _backed off_ , her eyes betraying a facsimile of pain—was so utterly _Lealle_ that Meri almost stayed. She’d grown up without memory profiles and holograms to replace the people who had died, but Coran used to swear by them. _A way to say goodbye,_ he’d said. _A way to remember the good times and not just the_ _sorrow at the end._

Right now, Meri could almost believe that.

But it still hurt too much. Hurt more than it should, really. Why should she still be mourning someone who had died so long ago?

Meri opened her mouth, searching for something to say. _I’ll get over this soon,_ or, _It’s not you,_ or _something_ , because Lealle was still looking at her with so much sorrow it felt like something in Meri’s chest was going to break.

The words didn’t come, and Meri silently turned and walked away, the silence behind her an electric thing that left her skin itching. She wandered the castle with no destination in mind. Coran and Allura were up on the bridge, conferring with Anamuri in preparation for the New Alteans’ arrival. Most of the other paladins were down in the Yellow Lion’s hangar, greeting Hunk and Shay and the half dozen healers they’d brought back with them.

Meri avoided both locations, an odd sort of melancholy settling in her chest. Coming back to the Castle of Lions hadn’t been quite the homecoming she’d expected, especially when the halls she’d always known to be crowded were silent and dark. She’d made it through so far mostly by focusing on what needed to be done, but right now they were in a holding pattern, waiting for Kolivan to arrive with his pilots and the other councilors. He could have at least told them what the mission was going to be so they could prepare.

Meri’s feet eventually carried her down to the residential floors, where the paladins’ families were settling in. They’d claimed their own little block of rooms almost directly above the rooms where the Galra refugees were staying—and Meri probably shouldn’t clue Mateo in to the air ducts that would provide a relatively straight shot from his room to Maka’s.

The two boys were nearly inseparable these days, and Wyn joined them whenever he wasn’t glued to Coran’s side. They got up to plenty of mischief without Meri’s input, and Rosario really didn’t need the added stress of her younger son disappearing into the walls.

Rosario and Ramon were gathered around a table in the lounge with Sebastian and Lana, trying to iron out lesson plans for Luz and Mateo. No one here had practical experience with homeschooling, and Meri had given Rosa just enough of a demonstration of the educational AI to assure her the castle couldn’t stand in for a teacher. Not that American public schools would have cared about the subjects stored in the castle’s computers, anyway.

Thankfully Lana was a teacher—high school chemistry and physics, so not the _most_ relevant, but better than nothing—and she’d spent the last few days gathering up everything she could find on fifth and seventh grade curriculum. Sebastian had taken a class on classic children’s literature last semester, so he’d donated a small library and a curated selection of historical podcasts. Meri had already volunteered her services kid-wrangling, along with the broad-if-eclectic collection of resources she’d gathered while teaching herself about life on Earth.

She was honestly surprised Rosa had accepted the offer. Things had been weird between them since the battle, which probably had something to do with the fact that Meri was not, in fact, a human woman entering her middle years.

On her more generous days, Meri could ascribe it to the usual sort of awkwardness that followed Alteans who chose to intermingle with other species. Meri was already a hundred and fifty, and still barely an adult—but even before her ten thousand year nap, many of the non-Alteans she’d grown up with had been getting old. Hell, that had been a large part of the reason she’d come to the Castle of Lions in the first place. Her parents’ trade ship, which they’d purchased shortly after Meri was born, had been staffed largely by off-worlders, and a generation had lived and died in the span of her life. Her parents were surrounded by their friends’ children and grandchildren, and Meri had no cohort of her own.

So her parents had returned to Altea, and Meri had come to the castle-ship, and for a while things had been better.

Meri didn’t think that was what had happened here. This was about her own lies and the fact that Rosa had never really known her. Anxiety began to rise in Meri’s throat, but before it could overwhelm her slow resignation, Rosario turned and caught sight of her. Rosa’s eyes widened. She said something to the others at the table, her voice too soft for Meri to hear, then came toward Meri.

“Hey, ah,” Rosario hesitated, her gaze drifting to where Luz sat with Azra and Zuza, watching an Altean children’s show. Zuza was the most engaged of the three, despite being nearly twice Luz’s age, while the younger girls mostly just seemed confused. Rosario scratched the back of her neck. “Sorry. I keep trying to call you Lena.”

“It’s all right,” Meri said. “You can keep calling me that if you like.” She tore her eyes away from Luz and studied Rosario’s expression. She seemed awkward, but not angry. That was a good sign, wasn’t it? “You want to go for a walk?”

Rosario nodded, and the two of them headed out together. Meri was keenly aware of the inches between them, the space of thirteen years of half-truths.

“So...” Rosario said after a time. “We haven’t really talked since...”

Meri cringed. “I’m sorry, Rosa. I should have told you the truth from the start.”

Rosario hummed, blowing on her hands. This level had been unused until the humans moved in, and the climate controls hadn’t yet adapted to their optimal temperatures. “I wish you had,” Rosario said. “No one should have to be alone after something like that.”

Meri’s breath caught in her throat, and she turned, surprised to find Rosario smiling. There were wrinkles around her eyes now, gray in her hair that hadn’t been there when Meri had first met her. But the kindness in her eyes never changed.

“I wasn’t alone, Rosa,” Meri said. “I had you.”

Rosario stopped in the middle of the hallway and pulled Meri into a hug. “You still have me.”

Meri lifted her hands, gingerly holding Rosario by the shoulders. “Even though I got Lance pulled into this war?”

“I’ll admit I’m not thrilled about that,” Rosario said. “But I don’t blame you. You’re not much older than Lance, are you? You’re no older than you were the day we met.”

“Not really,” Meri admitted. “I mean, there’s no easy way to compare human and Altean ages, but at this point, I’m done with puberty, so the last thirteen years for me is like… a year and a half for you?”

Rosario blew out a long breath. “Well now, that’s just not fair.”

Meri smiled, short-lived though it was. “So… we’re okay?”

Rosa squeezed her, fingers digging into Meri’s back. “I can’t decide whether to ask you to look out for Lance and Val, or whether I ought to be fighting my hardest to protect _you_.”

“Compromise?” Meri suggested. “I’ll look out for them and we can go back to having girl’s night every now and again?”

With a full-bodied laugh, Rosario pulled back. “I don’t know that I can be called a _girl_ at this point, but I’d be happy to reinstate the tradition.” She smiled, and Meri felt some of her tension bleed away.

“Okay, then. It’s a date.”

* * *

“So we’re figuring, set up base in Carlsbad?” Hunk said. His words were meant for the Balmeran healers he was getting ready to transport to Earth, but he kept looking at the others—Lance more than most. He kept doing that, ever since the big battle the week before last.

There was a part of Lance that kept saying, _Of course he keeps looking at you, Shiro left you in command of the Carlsbad battle._ The rest of him was one long, silent scream of terror.

It was bad enough having the flight instructors from the Garrison treat him as a commanding officer, as they’d done without prompting during the battle and had continued to do, albeit grudgingly, the handful of times they’d been in contact since then. And, hell, having the other cadets look at him like some kind of folk hero was downright _awesome._

But Hunk?

It was weird. Lance kept wanting to grab him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him.

“Sounds like a good starting point,” Lance said, trying to sound flippant. “You said there’s three survivors in Carlsbad?”

“Four,” Hunk said. “Then two from the West Coast, two from Brazil, and everyone else is on their own.”

Lance nodded. It made sense, really. Aside from the triple whammy of the Kerberos disaster, Lance and his friends going missing, and their families’ rampage—which together had turned Carlsbad into a battlefield—the Galra-Garrison alliance had taken great pains to stay behind the scenes. They’d taken prisoners when someone strayed too close to the wrong secret, but they tried not to make a pattern of it.

The result was a logistical headache. Of the fifteen humans who had escaped with Val, twelve had been implanted with crystals, and those were scattered across six countries. The Balmeran healers would have to meet with each of them one-on-one and explain about the crystals and the Quintessence-based treatment they were here to offer. No one wanted the survivors to feel like they were being hounded, and they were so spread out that the Balmerans would probably have to start up a rotation, but Shay had wanted to set up a kind of home base for them. Keep the aliens close to each other so they didn’t feel quite so out of place.

Lance agreed with the plan whole-heartedly. He just didn’t know why Hunk and Shay were acting like it needed his approval.

“So, you gonna take them down today, or what?”

Hunk hesitated. “Yeah, I guess… You--?”

“Lance!”

Lance gave a start and turned toward the elevator. “Shiro?”

Shiro nodded to Hunk and Shay, then waved Lance over. Lance trotted over, confusion pinching his brow.

“Need something?”

“The delegation from New Altea just arrived,” Shiro said. “Allura and Coran are giving them a quick tour of the Voltron Guard fleet, but we’re meeting up in the war room soon to talk strategy.”

Lance’s steps slowed, and he stopped just outside the elevator as Shiro entered. “Okay…?”

Shiro gave him a funny look. “Do you want to come?” he asked slowly, sounding like the question shouldn’t have needed to be asked.

A thrill shot through Lance, followed by a fizzle of unease. “You—want me to come?”

“Of course,” Shiro said. “That’s twice now you’ve stepped up to lead the others when Allura and I were… indisposed.” He gave a lopsided grin, holding the elevator door open. “Seems like a good idea to have you up to speed on the whole situation in case something like that comes up again. Besides, Coran says you’ve got a head for strategy.”

Lance felt himself blushing and hurried into the elevator, angling himself so Shiro didn’t have a good look at his face and rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m pretty average at strategy, really. I just like video games.”

“Uh-huh...” Shiro crossed his arms, leaning back against the wall. “Well, average or not, I’m expecting this ‘test’ to be something nasty. Allura and I both think it might be helpful to have someone else to toss ideas around with.”

For once, Lance didn’t know what to say to that. It was a lot of responsibility, consulting on the mission that would determine whether or not they forged an alliance with New Altea. As much as he wanted to jump up and down at being invited to something so important—at the fact that Coran, and apparently Shiro and Allura, though Lance was _worth_ inviting—he couldn’t help being a little, well, _scared out of his shit._

What if he messed up?

He didn’t have time to worry about it—Altean elevators were nothing if not speedy—and before he knew it he was at the door of the war room, surrounded by stately Alteans and Galra so tall Lance felt like he was ten years old again and trying in vain to join the adults’ conversations.

“Shiro!” Allura called, her voice layered over with a silky sort of charm that didn’t quite manage to sound natural. She seemed overwhelmed by the councilors, and Yvis’s quiet presence at the edge of the room was doing nothing to ease the tense air. “Perfect timing. Allow me to introduce you to the High Council of New Altea—some of it, at any rate. Councilors Meeran, Vek, and Amay,” she said, gesturing to each in turn. All three appeared Altean at first glance, and it took a moment for Lance to realize the whites of Vek’s eyes actually glowed faintly yellow. Galra heritage? Lance thought he remembered Coran saying something about that. He wondered if eir violet hair and markings—not just the usual _glaes_ that framed eir eyes, but along eir hairline as well—also came from Galra genes.

Allura turned last to the only Galra Councilor.

“And this is Councilor Kolivan,” she said. “He commands the armies of New Altea, and his pilots are the ones who will protect Earth while we are away.”

Shiro bowed from the waist, waiting until he’d straightened again before he spoke. “Takashi Shirogane,” he said. “I pilot the Black Lion together with Princess Allura. And this is Lance Mendoza, one of our blue paladins. It’s an honor to meet you, Councilors. I trust your journey was pleasant?”

“Pleasant enough, all things considered,” Amay said. The way she looked at the other councilors said ‘all things’ included an awful lot of bickering on the way over. If Lance had to guess, he would put her near Coran’s age, though her pastel look—periwinkle blue hair piled atop her head, vibrant eyes just a smidgen greener, and bubblegum pink _glaes—_ made her look like a cartoon princess from a show for six-year-olds. Her pale blue and green dress only cemented the illusion.

“The Guardian is below with our pilots,” Kolivan said. “Jana, our Mistress of Aviation, is with him to help her pilots get settled, but she will be joining us before the mission begins.”

Lance frowned. “Guardian? You mean Coran?”

Kolivan inclined his head. “Our legends have a great deal to say about the Two Survivors. The Lost Princess and her Guardian—the ones who would return to us and call us to battle.”

There was an edge to his words that made Vek hunch eir shoulders and Meeran purse his lips, but this obviously wasn’t the time to ask for more details. Ten thousand years of history and an entire planet’s worth of politics were probably more the sort of thing he should be asking Yvis about—in private. Ze seemed not to know how to take things personally, which was great for filling in gaps in cultural knowledge, though Lance did have to wonder whether it was the best idea for hir to be at this meeting.

Then again, ze had more (i.e., _any_ ) experience dealing with the Councilors, so Lance wasn’t about to kick hir out.

“In any case,” Kolivan straightened (in case he didn’t already tower over them all) and clasped his hands behind his back. “I trust you won’t mind if we begin our briefing now? I’m sure none of us wants to waste any more time than we have to.”

Allura joined Shiro on one side of the massive table that took up the center of the war room. There was a holographic projector built into the tabletop, casting formless wisps of blue into the air as the Councilors took their seats along the far side. Meeran had brought an assistant, a skittish woman with lavender skin and deep red _glaes_. She remained standing behind his seat, and Yvis started to move toward her.

Lance snagged hir sleeve as ze passed, then cocked his head toward the open seats beside Shiro. Yvis blinked twice, then nodded and sat beside Lance. Shiro glanced over at them as Kolivan plugged a data stick into the projector.

“In case I have questions,” Lance whispered. “No reason to go offending the folks with the proverbial nuclear codes.”

Shiro’s lips quirked upward. “Good thinking.”

Lance’s chest swelled at the praise, and he sat back, marginally less nervous than he’d been on the elevator ride up here.

That, of course, only lasted until Kolivan started talking.

“The _Red Swiftling_ is a civilian vessel that launched from New Altea one decaphoebe ago.” An image appeared above the table—a sleek, streamlined ship that reminded Lance a little of a smaller version of the castle-ship. There was a little bit more flare to it, but it was obvious that whoever had built it shared the same design sensibilities as the architect of the castle.

Kolivan pressed a button, and a dozen faces appeared to one side of the ship, the number including both Galra and Alteans. Lance spotted two children among them, and his breath caught in his throat.

“We had prepared another test for you, paladins, but early this morning our spymaster sent us a message saying that the _Red Swiftling_ had been discovered by Zarkon’s forces. If they have not yet launched their attack, they soon will. In lieu of a test, we ask your aid in rescuing the passengers and crew.”

“In _lieu_ of a test?” Meeran asked, staring at Kolivan like he’d just offered the paladins a lollipop. “This _is_ the test. If they bring our people back and keep the ship from falling into Zarkon’s hands, then they pass. Otherwise, they still haven’t proven themselves, and I still vote for a non-military alliance.”

Amay sat up straight in her chair. “Well _that’s_ hardly fair. You expect them to do all that when we don’t even know whether or not anyone’s still alive?”

Lance leaned over to Yvis as the debate turned toward petty bickering and Kolivan lifted a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose.

“Hey,” Lance hissed. “Yvis. I thought you guys didn’t leave home all that often.”

“We don’t,” Yvis said. “This is the first time I’ve ever left the surface.”

Lance nodded. “Uh-huh. Okay. So then… what would have happened if we weren’t here to do this rescue? Would the Accords have taken care of it?”

Yvis blinked a few times, and for once hir air of distraction evaporated, leaving genuine sorrow in its place. “In that case, the _Red Swiftling_ would have been on their own.”

“What—you wouldn’t have even _tried_ a rescue?”

“No,” Yvis said. “We… Until relatively recently, we did not allow anyone to leave the planet at all, except our spies. The Senate was too worried about someone getting captured or killed. But people started to protest, and New Altea was never meant to turn into a prison for our people—only a haven. So the Senate passed a new law that let anyone who wanted to leave apply for an exit visa. The Senate provides them with a ship that cannot be traced back to us, but in return they have to agree to cut all ties with New Altea. They’re not allowed to return, and we won’t give them any aid if something like this happens. If we hear about it at all.”

Lance wanted to say something to that. To demand to know how many lives had been lost that might not have been, if only the Council would get off its ass and fight back.

Then he remembered that Wyn and his family had left New Altea. That they’d been caught by the empire, and probably all of them but Wyn had ended up dead. He wondered whether they’d ever regretted their decision to leave.

Yvis reached out, gripping Lance’s forearm. “We would help if we could,” ze whispered. “Every time we hear about something like this, we all mourn the fallen. But once we give up on hiding, there’s no going back.” Ze paused, head bowed, and Lance barely caught hir next words. “Believe me when I say I wish you the best of luck, paladin. Not only in this rescue, but in swaying the Council, as well.”

“Thank you, Yvis,” he said. “We won’t let you down.”

* * *

Akira rubbed the back of his neck as the six-man squadron landed their fighters in Guard Hangar N-2. There was a little bit of wobble as they set down, but they all made it to their spots without incident, and Akira let out a small breath.

“It’s better than last time,” Layeni said, exhaustion pulling at her words.

Akira grunted in acknowledgment, resisting the urge to point out that _last time_ this particular squadron had gone on a full-scale training run, two ships had ended up with significant structural damage and one of the pilots had been laid out for an hour with a bad case of vertigo.

They _were_ improving—all of them. It was just that the Altean ships handled so much differently than anything any of Akira’s pilots had flown before, even those who had come from Anamuri’s ranks. Akira had put in close to a hundred hours of flight time over the last two weeks, half of that on a simulator he’d found in the bowels of one of the castle’s towers. Once hooked up to Pidge’s text translation program, it had done wonders for Akira’s comprehension of just what the hell he was looking at every time he set foot in that small, dark cockpit.

A hundred hours—more than anyone else except possibly Layeni, who hadn’t left the castle-ship since the battle—and Akira still occasionally mistimed his maneuvers. These fighters were just so _fast_ , and he’d never flown in a vacuum outside of sims, and god only knew how he was supposed to train the rest of his pilots.

They were up to a dozen now, two squads of six, not counting Akira himself. Akira had been reluctant to accept Jeya, a little dinosaur-like alien who looked and acted even younger than Pidge, but she’d turned out to be one of the better pilots. _The_ best aside from Layeni, in all honesty. He might have put her in charge of the other squadron if he’d thought the other pilots would respect her command.

As it was, he’d put Jeya on Layeni’s squad, along with Ivka and Henrok, the two Galra refugees who’d volunteered to fly in the Battle for Earth, and two Garrison pilots who, like Akira, would rather be actually defending the Earth than taking orders from an organization that had allied itself with the Galra Empire—however much the remnants of Garrison Command wanted to undo Iverson’s damage.

The other squad was made up entirely of pilots who’d come from Anamuri’s forces, though Akira was beginning to suspect they were pilots by necessity rather than by trade. They weren’t _bad_. They just needed more practice.

A lot more practice.

“All right, that’s good,” Akira said, trying to force cheer into his voice. Fortunately he was watching from an observation platform high above the hangar floor, so he didn’t have to school his expression. “Go ahead and power down for now and stretch your legs. I’m going to check in with Princess Allura and see how soon we’re leaving. You may need to hop on over to the _Kera_ here in a bit.”

Several of the pilots lifted their hands in acknowledgment, and Akira switched off the loudspeaker before breathing a heavy sigh and dropping into the spinny chair by the comm panel.

“You need to be firmer with them,” Layeni said, standing stiffly beside him. “They signed up to be soldiers, so treat them like soldiers.”

Akira squeezed his eyes shut, refusing to acknowledge his budding headache. “You’re right,” he said. “I know you are, I just… I’m not a soldier. Never really had the patience for the whole boot camp experience.”

“Then let me whip them into shape.”

Akira cracked his eyes, studying her. “You’re serious?”

“Of course I am.” Layeni hesitated a moment, then relaxed her posture, taking a seat beside Akira. “You’re not a drill sergeant, okay. You’re more the charismatic leader type. I get it. So you do the pep talks and the inspiring speeches, and I’ll handle training.”

Akira couldn’t deny the appeal in her proposal, but he could see in her the strain of weeks without proper rest. Deep furrows seemed permanently etched into her dark skin between her brows and at the corner of her eyes. The skin beneath her eyes was puffy with lack of sleep, and her movement all day had been sluggish, as though she could use several more hours in bed. She’d shaved her head after her ordeal in Project Balmera, unable to deal with the brittle, damaged hair, and it had only just begun to grow back in.

“I can’t put all that on you,” he said, straightening up. “I’ll—I’ll adjust.”

Layeni snorted. “You’re in over your head, Akira. No judgment,” she added, holding up her hands. “I am too.”

“Yeah?”

She rubbed her eyes, flashing him a weary smile. “Aliens, intergalactic war, magic crystals? I think we’re all a little out of our depth here. Whipping new recruits into shape is something I’m good at. It’s something _familiar_ , which might be more important. Gotta stay sane somehow, right?”

That almost made Akira laugh. “You say that like it’s possible.” He braced his hands on his knees, shaking his head. “Okay. Okay, consider yourself officially in charge of training. What can I do to take some things off your plate?”

“Maintenance?” she suggested. “I can do basic repairs on the ships I flew back home, but this alien tech is way over my head. We’re all going to need at least a basic primer in space ship mechanics. I don’t care if you teach yourself or hunt down an expert somewhere, but emergency repairs are going to be a priority sooner than either of us would like.

Akira nodded. “Now _that_ I can do.” He stood, squared his shoulders, and nodded to Layeni. “Good luck, Lieutenant. Give ‘em hell.”

* * *

It didn’t take long to hash out a plan—owing mostly to the fact that though Keena’s spies had relayed plans for an ambush on the _Swiftling_ , there were few details to be had. Not the number of ships that had been deployed, not anything about any robeasts or other weapons that might turn up. Just the coordinates and enough information for the spy to recognize the ship _._

Then again, Zarkon seemed to have targeted this ship specifically—something Shiro pointed out might mean he’d discovered New Altea’s existence and was trying to gather more information. In which case, there was likely to be a considerable force waiting for the paladins on the other side of the wormhole. After ten minutes, the strategy meeting had been called, the councilors off to prepare their troops, Shiro, Allura, and Lance batting about half-formed strategies, any of which would need to be amended as soon as they came out of the wormhole and saw the situation as it was.

Kolivan, Amay, and Vek had all opted to come along, while Meeran stayed with Anamuri’s forces, “to command the New Altean troops.” He’d sent a little robot along to act as his eyes and ears, and Coran had already seen Pidge eyeing it, like they were considering claiming it as salvage.

Coran wouldn’t say Meeran was a coward for staying behind. He might _think_ it, but he knew too well the balance they had to strike here. Kolivan and Amay were firmly on Voltron’s side, and Coran thought it likely Vek would be swayed if this rescue went well, but Meeran was another matter entirely.

Well, there was no use worrying about him now. Innocent lives were in jeopardy here, and it was up to Voltron to save them. Alliances would come later.

Everyone was already in position—the paladins in their Lions, Tev and Zelka at their stations on the bridge. Akira was here as well, pacing behind the black paladin’s station. He’d left the rest of his pilots behind on Earth, but he insisted on being here. He’d take up the controls of a security drone once they were in it, and he had a fighter prepped in the hangar in case the situation called for it.

All of the paladins’ families were on the castle—those who had chosen to come, at any rate; Shiro’s parents, worried about his grandfather’s health, had chosen to remain on Earth. Most were below, doing what they could to distract themselves, but Karen, Eli, Akani, and Rosario had joined Akira by the drone controls, each showing varying degrees of unease.

“It’s going to be okay,” Akani said, abandoning the hangnail she’d been biting at. Her eyes darted to Akira, whose flight suit lent him an air of authority. “Won’t it?”

He flashed her a smile. “Of course. They know what they’re doing.”

Rosario nodded, her grip on the blue paladin’s chair white-knuckled. “Besides, they have Lena with them. She won’t let anything happen to them.”

Coran caught Akira’s eye as he turned away from the others and saw his own trepidation reflected back.

Not that Coran had any doubt in the paladins’ abilities. It was just that everything was sharper with their families on board. With Karen Holt’s eyes burning holes in the back of his skull. He found it difficult to fault her for her anger, but it did stir up old pains. He’d spent his whole life around paladins, around the royal family who shared a special connection with the Lions. It had never bothered him that he couldn’t share in that bond. Not until this new generation rose up and Coran found himself standing aside as children charged into battle.

Well, there was no helping it now. Clearing his throat, he flipped on the comms. “All ready, paladins?”

“Ready when you are, Coran,” Shiro said. “Let’s bring these people home.”

A small, pained sound drew Coran’s eyes to the side of the room, where the Councilors stood. Kolivan remained stern-faced as Coran powered up the teludav and confirmed the coordinates, but Amay clung to him like she might charge into battle herself if she let go, and Vek seemed on the verge of tears.

Coran squared his shoulders, tightening his grip on the control pedestals. “All right. Here we go.”

* * *

Sebastian looked up from the books he was sorting through as the first laser blast pinged against the ship’s shields. It didn’t sound like much, buried this deep in the castle, but he’d been listening for it for the last hour and the sudden break in the castle’s rhythm shattered his attempts at distraction.

Another hit came, twanging like a guitar string. Mateo slumped in his seat, letting out a groan that drowned out whatever might have followed. “ _Da-ad_ ,” he whined. “We’re in _space._ Do we _have_ to do math homework?”

Tío Ramon chuckled and mussed his hair, and Sebastian turned away, trying to ignore the cold weight that had settled in the pit of his stomach. He supposed it was good that Mateo and Luz could ignore the battle raging outside—Sebastian wouldn’t take that innocence away from them for anything, even if his own insides were a roiling mess of nerves and resignation. (That might have been the worst part, the coldness. Like nothing could change the fact that Sebastian’s sister and his cousin were out there risking their lives, so he might as well not even waste his energy on fretting about it.)

“Math is very important, you know,” Lana said, planting her hands on her hips and arching an eyebrow in Mateo’s direction. “You think your brother could have become a pilot if he didn’t know a little math?”

Mateo scrunched his nose up. “It’s just _numbers_ ,” he said. “What’s that got to do with flying a spaceship?”

“More than you can imagine.” Lana paused, a minute jerk of her shoulder betraying the fact that she, like Sebastian, was listening to the battle. Her smile turned strained, and she sat down at the table with Mateo and Tío Ramon. “I get it. Math is boring, and you don’t see why you have to do it. I don’t sit down and practice my times tables just for fun, either.”

“You don’t?” Tío Ramon asked with exaggerated surprise, and Mateo giggled. Luz, at the next table over with Sebastian’s parents, looked up in confusion.

Lana rolled her eyes. “Of course I don’t. Some people can make a career out of it, bless them, but not me. But I need to know math. I need to understand how it works. It’s like… like...”

“Like spelling bees,” Tío Ramon said. Mateo’s look of disgust brought a flicker of a smile to Sebastian’s face as he sorted three more books into the reject pile, deeming them too simplistic for either Luz or Mateo.

“I _hate_ spelling bees,” Mateo complained. “They’re almost as bad as math.”

Tío Ramon’s lips quirked. “But you know how to spell more words now,” he pointed out. “And you recognize them when you read them in a book.”

Mateo didn’t look convinced. “So?”

The next laser set an air vent rattling on its screws, and Sebastian lost track of Tío Ramon’s argument about how math, like spelling bees, would make Mateo’s life easier in the long run. He stared at the vent, unease pooling in his gut, and waited. For what, he didn’t know. It wasn’t like the enemy was suddenly going to come slithering out of the air vents, guns blazing.

It just felt _wrong_ to carry on like normal, considering the circumstances.

He was beginning to regret letting his parents talk him into this. He wasn’t a teacher. What did they even _talk about_ in middle school English classes? Vocab lists? Parts of speech? The extent of his recollection of middle school was a fake newspaper he’d had to make after reading _Tom Sawyer_ , and even that only stood out because his sister had gone overboard with the coffee stains and burnt corners, nearly forcing him to start from scratch.

He supposed he could have them do book reports. That was something kids did, right?

Sebastian was aware that this communal homeschooling effort was one big farce designed to keep anyone from admitting they were thinking about the battle raging outside. Luz and Mateo might genuinely have missed the memo, but the rest of them? Everywhere Sebastian looked, he saw gaunt faces and eyes that stared too long at something out of sight.

Who could blame them? Their kids—Sebastian’s sister and cousin—were out there risking their lives in an attempt to bring a handful of strangers to safety. He was proud of Lance and Val, in the abstract, but he just couldn’t wrap his head around the reality of it.

He should have gone up to the bridge, with Tía Rosa. He wouldn’t have done any more good up there, but at least he wouldn’t feel like an ostrich with his head in the sand, pretending he knew the first thing about teaching and hiding his cringes each time he heard the shields whine.

He wouldn’t go up there, though. He knew that for fact. As bad as it was sitting here doing nothing of use, mustering the energy to leave, to steel himself for the horrific sights of war, was many times worse. When Lance had disappeared from the Garrison three months ago, it had crushed Sebastian. When Val had followed him into oblivion, it had very nearly destroyed him. But the human mind could only take so much anguish before something broke. As the weeks had worn on and the grim reality of his shattered family had settled over him like a pall, Sebastian had sunk into an apathetic funk, struggling to remind himself that tedious chores like eating and getting dressed were good, fine, healthy things to do.

Now he had his family back, but the apathy clung to him, a feeble buffer against things he didn’t want to face. And he knew, with a certainty that settled in his bones like cold iron, that the second he stepped onto the bridge, the buffer would evaporate.

He wasn’t ready to face reality just yet.

So he stayed here, thumbing through books he hadn’t read in a decade or more, and flinched every time something rattled in the walls.

* * *

Pidge could only assume their mother had spoken to Shiro and Allura. Or Matt had. It couldn’t be a coincidence that they’d been appointed the designated driver for this mission.

No, that wasn’t even fair. A designated driver still would have _done_ something. Shiro had literally told Pidge to sit and wait.

They could feel Ryner’s concern through the bond. That, and a cloying whisper that seemed to say, _Calm down._ Ryner didn’t understand Pidge’s frustration. She didn’t see anything wrong with the arrangement, which wasn’t so far off from how they’d run missions in the past. But then, _she_ wasn’t the one with an overprotective mother suddenly breathing down their back.

There wasn’t much in the way of briefing before they headed out, as there wasn’t much in the way of intel. New Altean ship in danger, ambush either in progress or long since played out. Go in, kick ass, save a few grateful citizens. All in a day’s work, right?

Maybe not. They’d emerged from the wormhole to a scene of carnage in progress. The _Red Swiftling_ was easy to pick out, if only for its sleek Altean design. It had nothing on the Castle of Lions, of course, but those artful lines, the pale silvery metal glowing teal around the engines, stood out among the Galra fleet like a lighthouse.

It was surrounded, the attackers slamming it with four or five bursts from ion cannons for every salvo of lasers the _Swiftling_ managed to get off. Smaller fighters thickened the air around it, buzzing like flies around a carcass—an uncomfortably apt comparison, given the sickly red cast to the _Swiftling’s_ shields. They’d already been punched through in places, and sooty streaks blackened the hull where lasers had skimmed along its surface.

The paladins absorbed the scene in an instant, then dove into the fray. Black took point, lighting up the void with lasers that seared flickering streaks across Pidge’s vision, even with Green filtering out the most intense light. The lasers cut through the throng, reducing dozens of fighters to sparklers that burned bright for a short moment.

Then Blue and Yellow came in from the sides, twin hammers that caught one of the three warships between them. Yellow punched straight through the shields and on to the bridge, crumpling it to an unrecognizable mess before anyone had time to react to the new arrivals.

Pidge, having just finished a program that would let them listen in on Galra transmissions, saw the moment the fleet recognized the new threat. There was a sudden spike in transmissions, and Green relayed a general sense of panic, along with a few whispers of _Voltron._

“Looks like our reputation is spreading,” they said, diving into the crossfire. With Ryner there, Green’s precision was multiplied tenfold, and they spiraled through the chaos, taking shots in the shield on Green’s back, which was somehow able to absorb the energy. (Pidge was going to figure that out someday. They _were_. If they could replicate that ability in the paladin armor…? They shivered just thinking about it.) A gauge on the console charged a little more with each shot Green’s shield took, and when it was fully charged, Pidge unleashed a blast with LOKI—the Lightning Overkill Instigator, technically, and Pidge totally had _not_ fudged that just so they could say they had Loki on their team.

The lightning arced outward from Green’s mouth, frying every ship it touched and leaping on from there in a chain reaction that left half the fleet smoldering. Red slipped into the opening, picking off stragglers as she looped around the battlefield, taking stock of the situation.

“Looks like the _Swiftling_ has a hitchhiker,” Matt said, voice taut with the tension of battle. He flipped a switch, toggling Red’s interior cameras over to a view through her eyes. There on the far side of the Altean ship was a boxy-looking vessel, latched onto the hull like a tick. A boarding vessel. Even as Pidge watched, it detached, engines flaring as it zipped back across the battlefield toward one of the warships.

Shiro muttered a curse. “They’re disengaging,” he said. “Which means they likely have prisoners. But that’s okay. We planned for this. Pidge?”

For just an instant they considered a show of defiance. They had the ground team waiting in the back of their cockpit—Nyma, Meri, and a Galra woman named Jana. She’d come to Earth intending to lead the defense forces, but when she’d heard about the _Red Swiftling’s_ plight, she’d all but begged to be allowed to aid in the rescue. Some history with Wyn, as Pidge understood it. Apparently Jana had argued for a rescue mission back when he’d been captured, and had been denied.

Ryner was supposed to accompany them, while Pidge and Green stuck close, cloaked and ready to enact a quick extraction if the rescue went bad. But Pidge was quick, and they could be stubborn enough that no one would waste time arguing with them. If they wanted to, they could force their way onto this team.

They might have ignored Ryner’s mental scolding and Green’s quiet consternation, but Shiro’s silent nudge was more insistent. He couldn’t read Pidge’s mind—not technically, but when he and Allura were together in the Black Lion, they tapped into a diluted version of the Voltron bond that allowed them to touch the other paladins’ minds, to glean a small sampling of their thoughts and to implant certain impulses.

Right now, Shiro was telling them to stick to the plan.

 _You want your mother to believe you are a paladin,_ Ryner said through their connection, just a hint of a bite to her words. _The way to do that is to act like one._

Shame prickled at Pidge’s skin, and they ducked their head to hide the blush they were sure was splashed across their face. Ryner was right, of course. Charging in like a kid throwing a tantrum was the opposite of helpful. That didn’t mean it wasn’t tempting.

“Going in,” Pidge said, sighing resignation as they flipped on the cloaking device. Ryner smiled and sent a wave of sympathy their way, and Pidge answered with a roll of their eyes.

 _This is not a punishment,_ Ryner said as Green latched onto the hull of the vessel the smaller ship had entered.

Pidge didn’t argue. What was the point? They knew this wasn’t a punishment. It was just their mother trying to shelter them and Matt trying to “see it her way” and Shiro and Allura trying not to piss anyone off. Green was a good choice to go stealth, as Pidge had spent the better part of a week upgrading her cloaking device. It was more robust than the basic stealth capabilities the other lions had, and it would last longer to boot. And it wasn’t like Ryner was a _bad_ choice to send on the infiltration.

It was just that front-lining had always been Pidge’s job, and the sudden switch was jarring, considering the bitter arguments that had preceded it.

“Good luck,” Pidge said as the others sealed their helmets and plunged into the warship, Rover bobbing along behind them to act as Pidge’s eyes and ears. Pidge stayed where they were, turning their attention to the scanners. They had directions not to engage until the others were back on board, hopefully with the rescued prisoners, which meant there was nothing for them to do but fuck with the Galra’s systems. Rover was still compatible with most Galra systems, which gave Pidge the perfect in to the cameras, the door controls, and the sentry patrols.

It was a fun little distraction, running their security system in circles, even if Pidge couldn’t shake the nagging voice that said they were giving their family more fodder. The better they got at remotely hacking Galra ships, the less real action they were going to see.

But twiddling their thumbs would have been worse, so hacking it was.

“I’ve got a visual on the prisoners,” Pidge said, adding a slew of video feeds to the displays already cluttering Green’s viewscreen. Sentries and a handful of Galra officers surrounded a small group of prisoners. The feed wasn’t the best quality, so it was difficult to get a count of the prisoners, but Pidge spotted at least ten. Hopefully that meant no one had been killed yet. “Looks like they’re splitting them up. Like—oh.”

The bottom dropped out of Pidge’s stomach, and they had to swallow around a rise of bile.

“Talk to us, Pidge,” Lance said. “What’s wrong?”

“They’re separating the Alteans from the Galra,” they said. “I can’t say why, but I’ll bet it’s not anything good.”

Someone cursed vehemently, the voice too muffled for Pidge to identify. One of the Councilors, probably.

“These are not the first Alteans they have seen,” Kolivan said, his voice somber. “I suspect Zarkon means to put them to the question. He will want to discover where they came from.”

“And the Galra?” Lance asked.

Kolivan was silent for a long moment, and unease plucked at the currents running between them all.

“They’re going to execute them,” Pidge said. “Aren’t they?”

Cries of protest from the castle-ship overrode Kolivan’s confirmation, but Pidge didn’t need to hear it. It was obvious, really. What did a few rebel Galra matter to the Empire? The Altean survivors— _they_ were much more interesting. Pidge itched to get in there and help, knowing their time was severely limited on both ends. If the Galra were slated for execution, they weren’t likely to be kept around for long—not anywhere they might spread tales of free Alteans. Meanwhile the commanders of this ship would want to take the Alteans to high command quickly, before Voltron intervened.

“We’re right behind the Alteans,” Meri whispered, her comms boosting the volume of her speech and making it grainy.

Pidge spun toward another screen, fingers flying across their keyboard. “Ryner! Do you still have the--”

“Already on it,” Ryner said. A soft rattle sounded, followed by a click, and then the voices of the Imperial officers came through loud and clear.

“--saying anything yet,” came a clipped voice. “Though that’s probably the druids’ gas.”

Someone else chuckled. “If there’s one thing you can trust a druid for, it’s screwing with your mind.”

“What’s this?” Amay asked. “Some kind of sedative?”

Allura hummed discontentedly. “I’m not sure. We’ve never come across anything of the sort before. Your spies haven’t reported anything?”

There was a beat of silence before Kolivan said, “No. I’ll speak with our Spymaster, but we are just as much in the dark about this as you.”

On the ship, one of the guards gave a shove to the prisoner just ahead of him, a young Altean woman who fell against the wall, clutching her head until the sentries seized her by the arms and hauled her back in line.

“You think the rumors are true?” the first officer asked. “You think these people are from…?”

“New Altea,” said the other. “I’m positive of it.”

The collective intake of breath from the Councilors made Pidge’s stomach clench in sympathetic nerves, and the curses that followed made their skin feel tight.

“Someone betrayed us,” Vek whispered, horrified.

Amay made a small, pained sound. “One of the others they’ve captured? If even one of them broke under torture...”

Kolivan said nothing, but Pidge saw him, lurking just over Coran’s shoulder, looking grim. Pidge had to wonder if he was thinking what they were thinking—if the Empire already knew about New Altea, then staying out of the war wouldn’t protect them. Zarkon was hunting them, and it was only a matter of time before he found where they were hiding. They had to defeat him—not just because it was the right thing to do, but for their own self-preservation.

Maybe fear would be the kick in the ass Meeran needed to take a stand.

“Meri,” Allura said. “Listen to me. You’re going to need to split up. Pidge, keep an eye on both teams. You’ll have to get them both out before--”

Pidge felt it rumbling in the floor of Green’s cockpit like an engine roaring to life. It settled in their teeth and rattled; it rang in their ears. Dread seeped through their veins, and they glanced frantically to the screen where they could see Shiro and Allura.

“They’re preparing for a jump,” Pidge said. “They’re going to run.”

Shiro’s lips tightened, and Pidge felt his reluctance in the bond. He already knew what they were going to suggest, and he didn’t like it. Of course he didn’t; he was _Shiro._ But he also knew Pidge was right. The other lions were all busy holding off the rest of the fleet; not an easy feat without Voltron in play. They might be able to spare a pilot or two, but in the time it would take to get to the ship and get inside, the tide of battle might very well turn.

“You know I’m right,” Pidge muttered, already scouring the security cameras, hunting for the fastest route to the wormholer. They’d studied schematics of a handful of models, so they should be able to disable it quickly. They just had to _get_ there.

Shiro sighed.

“What are they talking about?” Pidge’s mother asked, breathless. “What are they planning? Pidge?”

Pidge smiled to themself, hating the way guilt twinged in their core. “Sorry, Mom. Duty calls. Shiro? We’ve got two minutes, tops, before this thing is gone.”

He hesitated a moment longer, then nodded. “Okay. Go. And be careful.”


	6. Proving Grounds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Four of the six New Altean Councilors arrived at Earth with word of the _Red Swiftling_ a New Altean ship under attack by the Galra Empire. Shiro, Allura, and Lance conferred with the councilors, and then Team Voltron began their rescue mission. Ryner, Meri, Nyma, and Jana (the New Altean Mistress of Aviation) boarded the Imperial ship to rescue the prisoners, who had been separated. Pidge had stayed outside to act as a getaway driver, but when the Galra ship began a wormhole jump, they had no option but to go in and try to sabotage the wormholer before it was too late.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Potential dysphoria warning (brief discussion of binders). Skip the paragraph beginning, "Karen’s words drove a spear of ice through Akira’s chest" as needed.

Pidge muted their comms the second they stepped onto the Galra warship. Their mother was raging on the other end of the line, drowning out any useful information that might have been offered up. But Shiro and Allura were still there in the Voltron bond, humming a steady _all clear_. If anything went wrong, they would let Pidge know faster than the comms.

They’d found their way to a dim, empty corridor that plunged deep into the maintenance decks of the warship. Aside from the occasional engineer, who all went down with a quick jolt from Pidge’s bayard, this floor was staffed entirely by sentries and maintenance bots. Pidge left a trail of shattered machinery behind them, never slowing their pace as they charged toward the wormholer. They’d put up a countdown in the corner of their visor, and it had dropped to sixty seconds by the time they sprinted out of the corridor into a wide open chamber nearly as tall as the Green Lion's hangar and three times the length.

How were the others getting on? With the prisoners split into two groups, the rescue party was down to two pairs—and they didn’t have the luxury of dodging all the soldiers by grappling up to the catwalks that ran over the engine compartment and charging right to the heart of the ship.

A soothing nudge from Allura assured them that the others were still all right, and they did their best to put it out of their mind. Forty-nine seconds.

They caught sight of the wormholer: an enormous cylinder crackling with violet energy. There would be a control terminal— _there_. Pidge raised their bayard and fired, catching an anchor on one of the support beams overhead. They leaped off the railing of the catwalk, retracting the tether as they swung in a wide arc through the air. If they aimed this right, they ought to be able to land right at their target, no problems whatso--

A laser skimmed past them, close enough to leave their skin tingling, and they cried out in alarm, hastily retracting the tether to yank themself up and over the rest of the salvo. Within seconds, their swing had put the monolith of the wormholer between them and the source of the attack—but the light show would have caught the eye of every sentry and guard in the room, which meant Pidge didn’t just have the impending wormhole jump to worry about. (Thirty-one seconds.)

Cursing, they deactivated their bayard, dropping the last five feet to the ground. They rolled as they hit and came up running, activating the processor in their gauntlet and connecting to the wormholer’s control systems. They were already typing as they skidded on their knees to a stop beside the control terminal.

Twenty-four seconds.

The wormholer let out an unholy screech as the power supply reached a peak, and Pidge felt like they’d just jammed a fork into a power outlet. Twenty-four seconds (twenty-one now) was being generous. This thing could go off at any second. And there came the first of the sentries, charging around the corner and opening fire on Pidge’s position.

“Get lost, assholes _,_ ” they growled, ducking behind the control terminal. They were through the firewall in ten seconds flat and leaped up, hammering the bright red _emergency stop_ button on the screen of the control terminal in the same motion that they summoned their bayard and speared the first sentry through the head. The wormholer crackled, faltered, then let out a tremendous sigh as it powered down.

Pidge grinned and heaved the sentry to the side like a worm on a fishing hook. It slammed into three of its fellows, and Pidge gave the lot of them a perfunctory burst of electricity before they disengaged, grappling themself back up to the catwalk and unmuting their comms.

“Wormholer is down,” they barked. “It’s getting hot down here, so I don’t have time to do any real damage, but it’ll have to finish it’s cooldown and recalibrate before they can try again, so we’ve got a good five or six minutes to clear out.”

“Great job, Pidge,” Shiro said. “The others have engaged with the guards and should have the prisoners secured by the time you get back to your lion.” His words were accompanied by a gentle _push_ that warned Pidge not to let themself get sidetracked by any sudden bouts of inspiration.

 _Yeah, yeah,_ they griped in their head, projecting loud in a way they knew Shiro and Allura could hear. _I get it already. I’m going._

They just hoped the others would be able to make as clean a getaway.

* * *

There was a storm raging beneath Karen’s skin, a hurricane straining to be unleashed. Eli could see it plain as day; hell, everyone on the bridge could see it. She gripped the edge of the console at Pidge’s drone station so tight Eli honestly thought she might leave dents, and her eyes never left the back of Coran’s head.

She’d tried to pick a fight with him once, just after Pidge disconnected their comms, with a muttered plea for Pidge to come out of this okay that reeked of an underhanded accusation.

Coran had flinched at her words, but his face and voice were calm when he turned to face her. “You know how to work the drones, Mrs. Holt,” he said. “Or, if you’d rather, you know where the door is.”

Eli had had to step in then, with a hand on Karen’s arm to hold her back from attacking Coran. She looked like she had a few choice things to say to him, but the middle of battle was not the time—and the middle of the bridge, with the bigwigs from New Altea trying to be inconspicuous in the corner—was not the place.

Still, there was a confrontation brewing, avoided this long only because Karen made it a rule to stay far away from Coran. They would have to talk it out soon, or it really would come to blows. And unfortunately, it was looking like Eli might need to get the ball rolling—and then be there to act as moderator to keep things from getting vicious.

The thing was, Coran was not a callous man. He carried himself like a soldier, and he refused to rise to Karen’s bait, but her words cut him deep. More than once, Eli caught him looking back at her, a look of such profound grief on his face Eli felt compelled to track the man down and give him a hug when all was said and done.

For now, though, his focus had to be on Karen.

“They’re fine,” he murmured, balancing on the arm of her chair. “You heard them. They finished what they went in there to do, and now they’re heading back to their lion.”

“They shouldn’t _be_ in there at all.” Karen cursed, grinding the heel of her hand into her eye. “How can you sit through this, Eli? Your _nephew_ is out in this.”

Eli glanced to Akani, who had chewed her thumbnail almost to the quick, her eyes riveted to the viewscreen at the front of the bridge. She hadn’t said a word since the battle began. Rosario, clinging to her like a scared child hugging a teddy bear, was no better.

“I know, Karen,” Eli said. “But I trust him. Hunk’s not the sort of person to say he can do something if he knows he can’t. If anything, he underestimates himself. So if he says they can handle this...” Eli blew out a long breath as something near the heart of the battle exploded. “I’m going to take him at his word until I have a reason not to.”

* * *

Nyma hated rescue missions. Hated the way they made her stomach churn, the way they lodged her heart in her throat and left her feeling like the deck beneath her feet might give way at any moment.

She hated how much they terrified her.

She careened around a corner and found her stance, lifting her rifle to her shoulder as Jana barreled into the line of sentries barring the way to the Galra prisoners. Breathing in deeply, staring down the tremors that crept into her hands like she was sixteen again and a virgin of warfare, Nyma took aim. She shot down the pair of sentries nearest the prisoners, then took the two guards between the eyes, not even blinking as the prisoners cried out in fear.

“Two more coming in hot behind you,” she called, turning her fire on the line of enemies with rifles who’d stopped well out of Jana’s reach. Jana switched her massive sword to one hand as she reached with the other for the pistol she kept holstered at her side. The woman was a typhoon, tearing through sentries like so many paper dolls, and the sword moved like it was made of air and bloodlust, though that much metal must have weighed as much as a small child. Nyma didn’t think she’d have been able to lift it two-handed, let alone take off two sentries’ heads with it while simultaneously warding off the newcomers with her pistol.

Nyma shot down the last of the line of riflemen, and her mouth ran dry as she turned her sights on the last three guards—and the prisoners huddled between them. A tall, lanky Galra prisoner with the same bluish tint to her fur as Rolo’s cried out as one of the guards grabbed her around the neck and pressed the barrel of his gun to her head.

_No._

She still saw him there, clutching a fresh laserwound, smiling as he ordered Beezer to get Nyma and the prisoners out. She still saw him, all those years ago when they’d first met and he’d silently offered her a well-worn blanket, a hot bowl of reconstituted ration sludge, and a gun. He hadn’t known her from any other would-be bounty hunter, and yet he’d armed her—all because he’d seen that she needed to feel like she had control of the situation.

Nyma didn’t think as she took aim. She didn’t let herself look at the hostage, or at the other prisoners crying out in terror nearby. Her attention narrowed to the pistol in the guard’s hand and the cruel sneer twisting his face.

Her rifle sang as she fired, adjusted her aim, and fired again. The first shot took the pistol in its power supply, overloading the system. Sparks snapped at the guard’s hand and the prisoner’s cheek, but they didn’t have the heat to do any real damage.

The second shot burned a hole through the guard’s eye and he dropped, the weight of him dragging his hostage to the ground before nearby prisoners sprang to her aid.

Nyma paid them no mind. The other two guards were moving, one taking aim at Nyma, the other at the fallen prisoner. Nyma shot this one first, two shots clean through the head before he could bring his gun around.

The last guard fired, and Nyma braced herself for the pain that never came. With a roar that rattled the screws in the walls, Jana barreled into the space between Nyma and the prisoners. Her shield absorbed the shot meant for Nyma, and her sword ran the man through before he could get off another round.

Silence descended on the corridor, broken only by the meager whirring of the downed sentries and the terrified sobbing of the prisoners.

In an instant, Jana’s demeanor did a one-eighty. Her shield retracted into its mounting on her bracer, and her sword disappeared into its sheath. She seemed to shrink, the slope of her shoulders softening, her hands coming up in a disarming gesture.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You’re safe now. We’re going to get you out of here.”

Nyma rested her rifle against her shoulder, averting her eyes. She couldn’t do this—couldn’t watch the prisoners shatter as Jana introduced herself and Nyma. These were people who had expected to be abandoned, and instead they’d found their homeworld teaming up with a living legend to come save them. Hope and disbelief and emotions too powerful to name brought more than one person to their knees, though their neighbors were quick to help them up.

Setting her jaw, Nyma turned her attention to the far end of the corridor. They had peace for now, but this ship was rife with enemies. “We need to move,” she growled, not caring that she sounded callous. These people had been through an ordeal, sure, but that didn’t change the fact that they were all still dead if they hung around. The hugging and the crying could wait.

Thankfully, no one protested, and once they were moving, Nyma was able to breathe a little easier. She stayed at the back of the group, her eyes fixed behind them, her hands traitorously unsteady on her rifle. (From irritation, she told herself. She had to stop twice to help someone who had stumbled, both times leaving herself open to an ambush.)

They did run into trouble on the way back to the Green Lion, but only isolated clumps of sentries. Nyma shot down those that came from behind, Jana wrecked those ahead, and several of the prisoners took up weapons as they continued on.

One last ring of soldiers stood between them and safety, but before Nyma could take them out a streak of neon green shot out of an adjoining corridor. The tip of Pidge’s bayard lodged in a sentry’s chest before retracting, yanking it off its feet. Jana charged into the confusion as half the force turned toward the new threat, and Nyma and the prisoners picked off the rest of the guards one by one.

“Come on!” Pidge cried, dancing on their toes as Jana ripped the last sentry’s head off its shoulders. An all-too-familiar whine took root in the walls, and Pidge cursed. “They’re starting the jump cycle again! Everybody in. Where’s Ryner and Meri?”

Before anyone could answer, Meri herself came barreling around the corner, an Altean child clinging to her back. Meri held a pistol loose at her side, her other arm looped under the child’s leg. Four other prisoners followed after her—the last of the missing crewmembers of the _Swiftling_ , all of them staggering as though drunk, one clutching a bloody wound on the side of her head.

Ryner brought up the rear, her organically engineered pistol wrapped around one hand. She slowed to match the injured woman’s pace, strain showing on her sweat-streaked face. “You’re okay,” she said to the Altean. “Just a little farther.”

Nyma broke away, followed soon by Jana, and took up post on either side of the prisoners filing into the lion, shooting down the sentries that appeared in pursuit of Meri’s group. Meri charged up the ramp with the Altean child, herding the other child, a mixed boy, ahead of her. Whatever the Imperial soldiers had done to the prisoners—sedative gas, from the sounds of it--seemed to have had a stronger impact on the Alteans than the Galra.

 _Of course they’d use something they were resistant to,_ Nyma thought, glancing backward as some of the Galra reached out to support their Altean crewmates. It was only a few seconds until they were all loaded, Ryner calling out the all clear before she joined Pidge and Meri inside.

Nyma glanced at Jana. “Go,” she barked, backing slowly toward the ramp. She gave up on aiming and laid down a spray of fire that had the guards ducking out of sight. Jana hesitated only a moment, then sprinted inside. Nyma followed close on her heels, the Green Lion’s mouth snapping shut so quickly as she broke away from the ship that Nyma lost her balance and pitched face-first into the back wall of the cockpit.

“Sorry!” Pidge called. “Coran, we’re coming out hot! Need some covering fire if you can spare it.”

Almost at once, the viewscreen lit up blue-white with a supernova’s glow. “Got you covered, Green,” Coran said. “How’d it go?”

Pidge glanced over their shoulder, eyes alight with the rush of battle. “Twelve prisoners present and accounted for.”

* * *

Vek clapped eir hands over eir mouth, tears gathering in the corner of eir eyes. “You did it,” ey whispered. “You actually did it.”

Eli glanced up at em, letting up on his drone’s trigger for a moment. The councilor seemed overwhelmed, and Eli kinda wanted to go over there and give em a hug. He didn’t suppose that was something you _did_ with New Altean royalty, or whatever these people technically were.

So he focused on his drone, and on fending off the swarm of fighters clawing their way toward the Green Lion and the escaped prisoners she harbored. She was still cloaked, but the call must have gone out from the guards aboard the prison ship, alerting the fighters to the place where she’d been docked. They swarmed the area, clogging the air until several of them exploded against Green’s shields by pure chance. That drew more ships, and more, gnats flinging themselves against the bug-zapper to create a beacon for their fellows.

Pidge and Ryner soon forewent cloaking, diverting power to the shields and engines and spraying lightning ahead of them as they punched through toward the castle.

Akira and Rosario had taken up drone controls alongside Eli—Akira considerably more accurate in his attacks than Rosa, but no more enthusiastic. Eli wasn’t sure how much of a difference they were actually making, but the combined effort of the drones, the castle, and all five lions kept the fleet at bay until Green was safely back in her hangar.

The other lions whirled as one, splitting off toward their own hangars as Tev, the Galra teen who manned the castle’s heavy artillery, lined up a shot on the _Red Swiftling._

Coran glanced at Kolivan, who nodded. Coran raised a fist and let it drop. “Fire!”

A streak of white lit up the sky, and the _Swiftling_ vanished in a flash of fire. Before the shadows had faded from Eli’s vision, Coran had his hands on the pedestals flanking him. A wormhole blossomed before them, and they plunged in.

The roar of battle cut off in an instant, leaving the bridge deathly quiet. Eli’s hands refused to give up their grip on the drone controls and he stared, shaken, at the milky blue swirl of the wormhole visible through his drone’s camera.

“And we’re clear,” Coran said, relief palpable in his voice. “Everyone all right?”

“All right?” Lance asked, a laugh brightening his words. “More like super freaking _awesome!_ Did you see us back there? We went in all _bam, wham, pow!_ Sorry, Zarky, you’re not getting these people today, am I right?”

A few feet away, Rosario breathed out a sigh that left her boneless, hunched over Lance’s paladin station with her thumbs pressed to the inside corners of her eyes. Akani placed a hand on her back, but Hunk’s laugh—tired but easy in a way Eli didn’t think he could have managed just now—reduced her to nearly the same state of emotional exhaustion. Rosa smiled up at her, commiserating.

“All good over here,” Hunk said. “How’s it looking with the rescue-ees? Should Shay meet you guys in the med bay?”

“A few minor bruises,” Ryner said. “The Alteans were drugged with what appears to be a mild sedative. They’re already beginning to recover, but I want to do a scan to be sure there are no other ill effects.”

“Of course,” Shay said. “I will meet you there.”

“Perfect.” Shiro’s voice rang out in stereo as he and Allura stepped out of the elevator that came from the Black Lion’s hangar. The bridge comms recognized his presence a split second later and removed him from the audio feed. “Matt, Keith, you guys okay?”

“We’re good, Shiro,” Keith said. “Do you need us up there, or should we go help these people get settled in?”

Shiro and Allura looked to the councilors.

It was Vek who stepped forward, eir trembling hands clasped at eir waist. “I don’t think we need to waste your time, Paladins. You showed great valor out there, and skill to match. I would be honored to call you ally.”

“That’s all well and good, Councilor Vek,” Meeran growled, his voice slightly distorted as it came through the little robot thing he’d sent in his place. It looked like the robot from _WALL-E,_ all seamless white metal and smooth curves. Meeran’s face scowled out at the paladins from a screen on its… chest? Eli was going to call that its chest. “However, your opinion is not the only one that matters.”

Allura’s expression darkened. Beside her, Shiro remained stoic, but the way Akira was watching him, Eli felt like he should be bracing for an explosion. Before either of them could speak, however, Amay planted herself in front of the robot.

“Oh, give me a break. You really want to do this after what we just saw? After they _rescued_ our people _and_ kept our tech out of Zarkon’s hands?”

“They know about us, Meeran,” Kolivan said. “They knew the _Swiftling_ was from New Altea, and they targeted it specifically. Would you really be the lone voice that forestalls the alliance that might keep us safe?”

Meeran scoffed. “Safe? You think painting an even bigger target on our back will keep us safe?” He shook his head, and the robot backed away from Amay, who seethed, looking like she might rip the little thing’s circuits apart. “Besides, my voice won’t be the only one.”

“Kortek abstained from this vote,” Kolivan reminded him.

“But she supports me.”

Vek crossed eir arms. “Does she? Does she still? When she hears about this—about our people, _alive_ because of Voltron—about Zarkon hunting for us—Do you _really_ think she’ll still call for nonintervention?” Meeran started to respond, but Vek went right on talking. “There _is_ no neutrality in this war, Meeran. We either stand with the paladins or we stand alone.” Ey paused, looking to Allura. “The Voltron Coalition is our only hope.”

* * *

There was little to discuss after that. Meeran relented in the face of the other councilors’ unified front, and Kolivan invited the castle-ship to return to New Altea to formalize the treaty and mobilize Earth’s defense.

Akira left with the paladins’ parents shortly after discussions turned toward the minutiae. That was Takashi’s realm of expertise, not Akira’s, and the battle had kindled a bonfire in his core that threatened to burn him through if he sat still through five more minutes of dry diplomatic talk. Akani and Rosario beat him to the escape by a few seconds, both of them sprinting for the elevator the instant the atmosphere relaxed enough to move without drawing the attention of half a dozen tense and pissed off intergalactic leaders. (It felt strange to think of Takashi that way, but wasn’t that exactly what he’d become? Black paladin of Voltron, on par with global kings and leaders of the frickin’ Federation. The guy who led the charge into battle against a literal army with just a handful of soldiers on his side.)

Karen remained where she’d spent the entirety of the battle, frozen with her hands clenched on the back of the green paladin’s chair. Akira and Eli, who had been about to follow Akani and Rosario, slowed, watching Karen. They exchanged looks, then changed course and headed for her.

“It’s okay,” Eli said, smiling feebly. “We made it through. Everyone made it through.”

Karen looked up at him, the lines around her eyes more pronounced than ever. For a moment worry overshadowed everything else, but then the anger returned and she straightened, turning her eyes to where Coran stood with Takashi, Allura, and the Council.

Akira inched closer to her, tensing. “Maybe you should walk away,” he said softly. “Cool down before you confront him.” Akira paused as Karen rounded on him, and he resisted the urge to immediately backtrack. “At least wait until the politics are over with.”

Karen’s glare was enough to melt through steel, but she listened—for all her stubbornness, for all she carried the wrath of a vengeful angel, she _did_ listen when someone else was speaking sense. Akira admired that about her, even as the thought of getting on her bad side scared him shitless. She stormed toward the door, and Akira traded wary looks with Eli before following.

His neck prickled, and he turned to find Coran watching them, his expression somber. Akira’s heart ached for the man—he clearly cared about the paladins, and he deferred to Allura and Shiro in most decisions regarding them. He didn’t deserve Karen’s hatred.

But at the same time, Akira couldn’t blame her for being upset. His own stomach had tied itself in knots when Pidge went into that ship, and Akira wasn’t even technically family.

The fight kept replaying itself in Akira’s head as he joined Karen and Eli in the elevator. Tension crackled in the air, and for once Akira had no desire to break the silence. He just kept hearing the horror in the paladins’ voices as they realized the warship was going to run. His skin crawled, fresh fear pooling in his gut. What would have happened if Pidge hadn’t been fast enough? If they’d disappeared along with Meri, Nyma, and Ryner, along with Jana and the prisoners? How long would any of them have lasted before they wound up dead? Would there have been time to find them, let alone mount a rescue?

Akira didn’t know. He couldn’t fault Takashi for sending Pidge in; it had been their only shot. But the absolute confidence in his voice—that terrified Akira. He knew his brother, and he knew Takashi never would have considered sending Pidge into that warship if he himself hadn’t faced ten times worse.

“This is bullshit,” Karen said, her words firecrackers in the small space. Eli’s shoulders hitched upward, but he kept his gaze on the door as Akira turned to look at Karen, watching the emotions roll across her face. “They’re _children_. They shouldn’t be doing things like this.”

Akira sighed. Only that—only a breath to try to tame the fears roiling inside him—but it was enough to fan the flames of Karen’s rage.

She rounded on him, lips going white as she pressed them together. “You _know_ I’m right. That man—That--” She growled, fingers digging furrows in her hair. “He’s as bad as Iverson.”

“You don’t mean that.” Akira couldn’t keep the warning out of his voice, and he met Karen glare for glare as she dug in her heels.

“Of course I do! Sending those kids out into this mess while he stands behind his so-called duties.” Her lip curled, and she leaned back against the wall of the elevator as the floors slipped away.

Eli’s eyes slid toward her, his shoulders hunched like he was preparing for a blow. “He’s doing his best, Karen. He obviously cares about all of them.”

“If he really cared, he’d be out there fighting instead of sitting here safe inside his flying fortress.”

Karen’s words drove a spear of ice through Akira’s chest, leaving him breathless. He felt like he'd just run a marathon in his binder and couldn't draw in enough air to clear the fog from his head--except that he'd traded his binders for his usual compression sports bras when he came to the castle-ship. The chance of a surprise attack was too high, and he'd learned early on that binding and heavy exercise didn't mix.

So there was no reason for him to feel like his chest was too small, his body locked in place as he watched, helpless, as his guilt reared its head and flung Karen’s venom back in her face. “I didn't see _you_ risking your life out there.”

Akira knew at once he’d crossed a line. Karen’s face went white, then crimson, her eyes narrowing to slits that said she was going to eviscerate him.

“Fuck,” Akira muttered. “I didn’t--”

_I didn’t mean it like that._

The lie caught in his throat, and for an endless moment they only stared at each other, Eli raising his hands as though he could soothe these wounds away with a few pacifying words. Akira didn’t give him the chance to try; he turned and hammered the button for the next floor, and when the doors slid silently open he stormed out, shame and guilt clawing at his throat.

“Akira,” Eli said.

Akira’s back crawled as he felt Eli reaching out after him. “Don’t,” he said. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

He kept walking, teeth on edge as he went, until the elevator doors slid shut behind him. Only then did he risk a glance over his shoulder, the fight draining out of him entirely as he saw he was alone. He drew up short, every inch of him shaking, his lungs straining to draw in enough air, and he pressed a hand to the wall in a feeble attempt to steady himself.

_If he really cared…_

If _any_ of them really cared, they’d be doing more. Coran flew the castle, provided the heavy fire that staved off the greatest threats. Akira flew with his squad, picking off the minor annoyances that might distract Voltron from their real targets. It was a small help, but it was something.

_And yet._

And yet today, what had he done? Sat in a chair and played a glorified video game that may not have made any difference at all. Everyone on the castle-ship had known this was a rescue mission. It was practically a given that someone would need to go into a ship swarming with enemies to get the crew of the assailed vessel out. And yet who had stepped up to follow the paladins into the heart of the beast?

No one but Jana.

Akira could have been there— _should_ have been there. If he’d been there, then maybe Pidge wouldn’t have had to go in alone. There was nothing stopping him, except for the fact that he’d been only mediocre in his combat drills at the Garrison and had rarely had cause to practice since graduation.

Akira’s fingers curled into a fist, which he hammered against the wall.

“Hey!” he called, lifting his head. “Ship! Creepy hologram things! I know you can see me.”

“Something I can help you with, Akira?”

Akira spun, startled by the sudden appearance of Keturah, the stately Altean woman who had been the last red paladin. She was a hologram, but that did nothing to diminish the impact of her sharp gaze or the severe cut of her straight, dark hair.

“Yeah,” he said, trying not to let his pounding heart show in his voice. “You have some kind of combat training program or something?”

“We have the gladiator.” A hint of a smile touched Keturah’s lips. “I’m not sure you want to go messing with that, though.”

Akira clenched his jaw. “Just show me where it is.”

Keturah shrugged, but turned obligingly and led the way to another elevator that took him down several more floors. They came at length to a quiet annex, surrounded on all sides by empty rooms that ranged in size from just about the size of the bedroom he’d been assigned, but with a mirror running the length of one wall, to almost as big as one of the lions’ hangars.

Keturah led him to a medium sized room, stopping in the doorway as she waved him through. “When you’re ready, just say ‘Begin training level one.’ To stop the match at any time, say ‘End training sequence.’”

Akira stared at her. “Level one?” he asked sourly. “Okay, I get that I’m not exactly my brother, but come _on_. I’m not _that_ bad.”

“The gladiator is designed for Alteans,” Keturah said evenly. “And given what I have seen of your species, it is for the best that you start slow.”

“Okay, _mom_.” Akira grabbed the pistol holstered at his side—still an ordinary gun with regular metal bullets. He hesitated for just an instant, wondering whether human weapons tech would do him any good against alien castles. He doubted anyone had tried it before; none of the paladins would have brought firearms to space with them, and they all had their own weapons now.

Well, nothing for it but to try. He checked his flight suit, which was lightly armored and, more importantly, well-padded. He wasn’t likely to avoid bruising altogether, but he could at least fend off broken bones.

“How many levels are there?” Akira asked, stepping into the center of the room.

Keturah arched an eyebrow at him, clasping her hands at her waist. “Ten,” she said. “Anything higher than that requires a team of five or override by the castle’s prime users, which at this time are Princess Allura and Commander Coran.”

Akira nodded. “All right. Begin training level five.”

A hole opened in the ceiling, and a robot dropped through. It was humanoid, though taller than most people Akira knew and built like a superhero. Its white and gold aesthetic was Altean through and through, but the gleaming sword it carried was no joke.

Akira had just long enough to wonder whether he should have listened to Keturah before the robot charged, drawing its sword back for a strike. And holy shit, it was fast. Akira backpedaled, firing three shots at the robot. The first missed entirely; the second and third sparked as the bullets glanced off the robot’s shell without doing any damage.

“Shit,” Akira hissed. “End--”

He wasn’t fast enough. The robot reached him in a heartbeat, swinging its sword with a vengeance. It cracked against Akira’s breastplate, driving the air from his lungs, and something _wrenched_ inside him. He fell backward, skidding across the floor, pain igniting in his chest.

“End training sequence!” he gasped.

The robot, already halfway to Akira’s new position, sword raised and ready to skewer him, froze, its glowing eye going dark. Akira scooted backward, hissing as his ribs protested, and leaned against the wall of the training room. He pulled his hand away from the rent in his breastplate and grimaced as he saw the sheen of blood.

Keturah glided forward, hands behind her back. “Shall I summon the Yellow with the medical training?”

Akira screwed his eyes shut, cursing softly, but he knew Takashi would be even more pissed if Akira tried to hide this. “Yeah,” he said, letting his head fall back. “That would be smart."

* * *

It was a long three days back to New Altea, and once more Matt found himself with little to do except practice his burgeoning magic. If you could call occasionally catching fire at inopportune moments _practice._

At least the trip was more pleasant this time, his mother’s tense presence on the castle-ship notwithstanding. They didn’t have Red’s speed to shave off half the travel time, but they had space to spread out and relax, and a dedicated mind could even evade unpleasant conversations. That alone made it easier for Matt to focus on the meditation exercises he was supposed to work through. He _was_ going to learn how to control his temperamental flames. Somehow he was.

Allura wasn’t here today; she and Shiro had been taking it in shifts to act as point-of-contact with the New Alteans. _All_ the New Alteans, including the Council, the pilots still stationed around Earth with Anamuri’s forces, and the refugees who had opted to stay on the castle-ship with its more generous accommodations. As far as Matt could tell, these shifts were mostly a lot of busy work that kept them near the bridge in case an emergency call came from Earth, interrupted by the occasional check-in with Kolivan or visit to the refugees below. The Galra they’d freed from Revinor had welcomed the New Alteans into their fold without a moment’s hesitation, and the two children—an Altean toddler named Era and a mixed race boy named Irvik—suddenly found themselves with a whole gaggle of playmates.

“So… what is this supposed to feel like again?” Val asked. She sat cross-legged on the floor of the training deck, Matt and Meri taking the other points of a triangle. They’d been at this for an hour already—and this after three hours of absolutely nothing yesterday.

Matt sighed, uncrossing his legs and stretching them out ahead of him. He absent-mindedly massaged his aching knee, searching back through his memory for the handful of times he’d succeeded in creating flame.

The problem was that he never exactly _meant_ to do it. He wanted to, sure, but his Quintessence only ever reacted to emotions so strong they blotted out rational thought—and most of those were so short-lived he couldn’t even analyze _in media res._ He was left with vague impressions and Allura’s own (mostly second-hand) descriptions of what it felt like to craft Quintessence.

“It’s like...” Matt leaned back on his hands, tracing the contours of the ceiling tiles with his eyes. He could see the castle’s Quintessence streaming through hidden veins—just faintly, but he could—and most of what he’d figured out about working Quintessence so far relied on being able to see its flows.

Val, of course, didn’t have that dubious advantage.

Matt pursed his lips. “You know that feeling when you come over a hill on a roller coaster? It’s like that, but weaker. And before that everything feels… _tight._ Like that prickly-scalp, goosebumpy, haunted house feeling. Does that make any sense?”

“A little,” Val said. She screwed her eyes shut, wrinkling her nose. “Not really.”

“It’s like your body knows something is going to happen,” Meri said. “You might feel like you’re flailing through a dark room hunting for a light switch--” Matt snorted, and Meri grinned-- “But on some level you _know_ when you’re brushing up against the right thing.”

Val cracked one eye open. “Okay, are you _sure_ this is friendly magic? Cause everything you’re saying right now screams _horror movie._ I don’t like my odds in a horror movie.”

“I don’t like any of our odds in a horror movie, to be honest,” Meri said. “But I see your point.” She drew in a long, slow breath and drummed her fingers on her kneecap. “It’s like… coating yourself in itching powder?”

Val held still for a moment longer, then doubled over laughing, touching her forehead to her crossed ankles. “Lena! That’s even worse!”

The worst part was that it wasn’t a horrible comparison. Shaping Quintessence always left Matt feeling like he’d very briefly shrugged off a two-sizes-too-small sweater, only to cram himself right back into it. It was an uncomfortable awareness of just how restrictive a magic-less body was.

“Wait!” Matt sat up straight, his back popping. “Meri, didn’t you say Keturah studied this magic?”

Meri’s eyes widened minutely, but she recovered quickly, pasting a blasé look on her face. “I think she did, yeah. Typical Red recklessness, you know.” She flashed a grin at Matt as he scowled. “Alfor thought it would do her some good to ‘learn some self-control.’”

“Yeah?” Matt asked dryly. “How’d that go for him?”

“The greatest feat of magic she ever did was lighting his cape on fire.”

Val burst out laughing, and Matt sat back, feeling inordinately smug on behalf of his predecessor. He couldn’t imagine the Red Lion flying with someone who was cut-and-dry, by-the-books military discipline. He couldn’t imagine anyone like that _staying_ by-the-books with the way Red flew. You needed to be able to think on your toes. You needed to be open to a sudden change of plans, because Red was looking out for openings every bit as much as her pilots—and her suggestions tended toward what some people might call crazy.

“Still,” Matt said, drumming his hands on his legs. “The problem right now is that we don’t have anyone who knows how this sort of thing is supposed to be taught, right? Maybe the Pygnar had some tricks that make it easier. Keturah would know about those, wouldn’t she?”

“I suppose she would.” The words seemed dragged out of Meri, her smile turning strained.

Right. Keturah had been her friend. Her mentor, in a way, though not to the same degree as Lealle. Matt supposed it would be something like losing Coran, or Ryner, or any one of the other paladins, only to have some newcomer to the castle go dredging up their memory to ask how to fix a leaky faucet. A glance at Val told Matt she’d reached the same conclusion. In fact, she looked like she wanted to reach out and give Meri a hug.

“We don’t have to do this,” Matt said. “I think the meditations _are_ working; I’m just impatient. Typical Red, right?”

Meri chuckled, though there was no humor in it. “No,” she said. “You’re right. If anyone on this ship can help you, it’s Keturah. Just...” She hesitated, then stood. “I’m gonna go check on Allura. I’m sure Keturah will keep you two busy.”

“Meri,” Val began, but Meri was already out of the room. Val sighed.

“Well now I feel like a jerk,” Matt muttered. “Think we should go after her?”

Val shook her head. “Give her time to calm down, I think? I don’t… I don’t think she likes other people to see her get messed up like this.” She rolled her bottom lip between her teeth, brow furrowed as she stared at the door. “I’ll try to talk to her later. For now, let’s just see whether or not talking to Keturah is going to help us.”

Matt couldn’t help but notice that Val didn’t actually call for Keturah’s AI. He didn’t really want to, either. It felt callous to go ahead with this after seeing how it affected Meri.

But Val was right. If they didn’t do this now, they’d just have to do it some other time. Better to find out early on whether Keturah had any worthwhile information or not. So, steeling himself, Matt lifted his chin and glanced around the corners of the room. “Keturah? You there?”

Her hologram materialized almost at once, as though she’d been listening in on their conversation. Hell, maybe she had been. The AIs were all peripherally linked to the castle’s main computers. Matt didn’t understand the details of it, but he was pretty sure on some level they were all monitoring the security feeds, ready to respond if someone called. It might have felt a little bit creepy, except none of the AIs seemed to consciously remember anything they may or may not have inadvertently eavesdropped on.

“Matt,” Keturah said, smiling graciously. “And Val. What aid can I give you?”

“You trained in Pygnarat magic, right?” Matt asked. “With Alfor?”

A distant look came across her face, and her smile faded somewhat. “I did. Can’t say I was ever much good at it, I’m afraid. Why do you ask?”

“We’re trying to learn,” Val explained. “We think it’ll help us with the crystal growth if we can control our own Quintessence. The only problem is, we don’t have a master to teach us. It’s like navigating a city with hand-me-down instructions. All we want is a street name and instead we’ve got, ‘Turn left after the Batman mural, then take the alley by the chicken in the tutu.’ And I don’t see a chicken in a tutu!”

Matt blinked at her. “Your family has the weirdest metaphors sometimes.”

Val spread her arms like she was fanning a skirt and bobbed into an awkward seated curtsy. “I’ll take that as a compliment. Point _is..._ ” She turned back to Keturah. “We’re having some trouble getting started, so unless and until we find a master of the art, we were wondering if you could give us some pointers.”

Keturah watched them for a long moment, the hologram going unnaturally still as she did so. Finally she nodded, kneeling down in the spot Meri had vacated. “As I said, I am not especially skilled in the art. I could kindle a fire if I focused, and I regularly altered the flow of my Quintessence as part of our meditation rituals, but if you’re looking for grand feats of magic I’m afraid you’re looking in the wrong place.”

“Meditation rituals are a good start,” Matt said, though in fact they sounded like just about the most boring thing he could think of. “What do we do?”

* * *

By the time her initial panic had run its course, Meri found herself on the hydroponics deck. It wasn’t much like what she remembered, though she supposed that was only to be expected. The herbs and tubers and other miscellany the castle staff had grown here ten thousand years ago had long since rotted away, abandoned when the universe went to hell. It had already been in bad shape by the time Meri left for Earth.

But it seemed Ryner had taken charge of this room since she’d arrived on the castle. The floors had been scrubbed to a shine, the suspension medium cleared out and refreshed, the system that monitored the nutrient solution re-calibrated. Meri didn’t recognize most of the plants growing in here, but the soft rustle of leaves, the green tint to the light, the babble of water running down the gently sloped trays—all that was intimately familiar. How many times had she walked down these aisles with Allura, ostensibly checking the plants’ growth as they stole a quiet moment away from their duties? How many times had she come here with Lealle? With Sa? The hydroponics deck had been a favorite place for the paladins to wind down after battle—or to sneak a snack before dinner.

The ache of loss never really went away, but it reared its head now, rising up with clawed hands that wrapped around her throat. She stopped just inside the door, surrounded by tranquil greens and golds, heart pounding like a wild beast was running her down. She clutched at the collar of her jacket—an ordinary old fleece jacket that she’d had for years, worn over a blue Altean jumpsuit that shouldn’t have felt so foreign against her skin.

 _It’s just Keturah,_ she told herself, struggling to draw breath. _It’s just a memory profile. You’ve seen memory profiles before._

But it _wasn’t_ just a profile. It wasn’t just Keturah. It was a slap in the face, an agonizing reminder that she’d failed to be there when her friends needed her most. She hadn’t replayed those last days since she first found Lance and started fixating on all the ways she might get him killed. But now those dark thoughts were back and she’d spent the last few weeks turning the past over in her head, wondering where she’d gone wrong and whether she could have done anything differently to keep Keturah and Lealle and all the rest from getting themselves killed.

“Meri?”

Meri’s heart clenched, and she shifted on instinct—first to Lena, then just as quickly back to herself, but stone-faced, her eyes showing no trace of the tears that were threatening to fall. Only then did she turn to face Ryner, who tucked a pair of small pruning shears into her work belt and wiped her hands on a towel as she came toward the door.

“Hey!” Meri said brightly, barely stopping herself from cringing at the way her tone fell flat. “How’s it going?”

“It's going well,” said Ryner. “The plants are growing even faster than I had anticipated. We should have our first crop soon.” She paused, antennae twitching as though asking a silent question.

Meri pretended not to notice. “Cool. Anything good?”

“Vegetables, mostly. Hunk wanted more variety for his cooking, and I’ve run out of room in my orchard downstairs. Were you looking for me?”

“No, just wandering.” Meri shoved her hands into her jacket pocket and shrugged. “Two more days till we get to New Altea, but I’m already feeling a little bit of cabin fever. I got this way on Earth all the time, you know. If there’s not a threat looming over my head at every instant, then I’ve got to be out poking at bears.”

Ryner’s eyebrows rose, and her voice acquired a note of concern, though it remained mild. “That doesn’t sound like a very pleasant way to live.”

 _Yeah, no shit._ Meri gave a bland smile, smoothing out the stress lines around her eyes with a delicate touch of Quintessence. “What can I say? I live on the edge.”

“Yes, but the edge of what?” Ryner watched Meri flounder for a moment, then turned without a word and went back to her work, rinsing her hands in a faucet along the back wall before she went to the plants, carefully removing dead offshoots and excessive growth where it was choking the healthy plants, leaning down to inspect the root systems. She paused every now and again to press some of her Quintessence into the plants. Meri saw the flows as warped threads in the air, colorless and vague. They took on no tangible form, and they made only minute changes to the plants Ryner touched. Meri wasn’t sure if she was trying to help them grow, or altering their DNA in some way. Pidge said she did that sometimes, just for fun.

“You don’t need to worry about me, Ryner,” Meri said at length. “I’m doing okay—really. I’ve just never been able to sit still, and it’s worse knowing what Zarkon is up to out there in the universe. I know it’s important for us to go to New Altea and all that, but I can’t help feeling like I’m wasting time.”

Ryner hummed thoughtfully. It probably wasn’t meant to sound suspicious, but it did, and Meri flushed.

“So.” She clapped her hands together and stepped up beside Ryner at the edge of one of the growth beds. “Need help with anything? I’m not exactly a gardener, but I’ve got as many hands as you need.” She shifted partway to Bytor to demonstrate, sprouting three extra pairs of arms that she waved for an instant before she snapped back to herself.

Ryner chuckled. She didn’t try to press Meri on her reason for coming to this room, thankfully, just set her to work drawing samples of nutrient solution for Ryner to test. When that was done, they went down to the reservoir tank below the floor to check for leaks and contamination. The castle monitored everything automatically, of course, but this system had been out of use long enough that Ryner wanted to keep a closer eye on it for now.

Meri wasn’t complaining. It was easy work, requiring just enough focus to keep Meri’s mind off less pleasant topics, and by the time they’d finished, she was able to release her subtle shift without her emotions betraying her.

It figured Ryner would wait for her to let her guard down.

“You are not weak for mourning,” she said, reaching down to help Meri up the last few rungs of the ladder from the reservoir up to the garden proper.

Meri froze, her grip on Ryner’s arm tightening. “What are you talking about?”

Ryner’s smile slipped sideways, a sardonic twist to it making Meri flush and avert her eyes. “Meri.” Ryner grabbed Meri’s other arm, holding her in place. Wise old eyes in a wrinkled face searched Meri, though she didn’t know what for. “What happened was not your fault.”

“I don’t--”

“I’ve worked with enough survivors to see what’s happening.” Ryner ducked her head, and Meri finally gave up on avoiding her gaze. She looked at Ryner and found her own aches lying just beneath the surface. “I have watched many of my own people die. Maybe I could have saved some of them, if things had gone just a little differently. But I chose to keep the resistance alive. I chose to be the leader my people needed me to be. And in my time as Elder, I spoke with many who felt the same guilt as I.”

“What did you tell them?” Meri asked.

“The same thing I tell myself every day: Guilt and grief are natural in the wake of tragedy. You can mourn those who were lost. You can aid those who still suffer.” Ryner paused, pressing her forehead to Meri’s. “But you lived, and that is not meaningless. It's okay to find new joys in the wake of tragedy.”

A new pressure built behind Meri’s eyes. Tears, yes, but also something deeper, an ache beyond mere sorrow. She pulled away from Ryner, gently dislodging the other woman’s grip on her arms. “How, Ryner? How can I possibly let go of something like this?”

Ryner’s eyes softened. “Perhaps it would help you to speak of what you saw, what you did.”

Meri couldn’t keep a scowl off her face. “I seriously doubt talking about it is going to help.”

“You’d be surprised.” Ryner held up her hands as Meri prepared for an argument. “I won’t force you, Meri. I only speak from personal experience. Talk to Allura or to Coran. Talk to Lance’s mother if that's easier. By Lubos, talk to your lion if you can’t talk to anyone else. From what I hear, she’s quite worried about you.”

“She’s what?”

“Worried.” Ryner shrugged, already turning back to her plants. “She and Green have been talking ever since you turned up at my door.”

Meri’s stomach plummeted. “What, does the whole _team_ know about my issues now?”

“Of course not.” Ryner looked up at her, mouth turning downward. “I told Green nothing except that you are here." She set aside her pruning shears and took hold of Meri's wrists. "I won't share this conversation with anyone, Meri. Not even Pidge."

"Can you do that? You two share a brain when you're piloting Green."

Ryner's antennae quivered in amusement. "And have you never kept a secret from yourself? A great deal of discretion is possible with a little mental discipline, you know."

Meri arched an eyebrow, a smile tugging at her lips. "I'll have to take your word for it, I guess."

"I suppose you will. And you'll consider my advice?"

Meri hesitated. "I will. I don't know if I'm ready to talk about it yet, but I'll get there."

She would try.

* * *

They took Rolo at dawn.

The great irony of it was that Sam had stopped fighting the Galra. He’d learned to endure, to survive, to lie low and watch and learn. Fighting gained him nothing but more beatings. Better to bide his time and wait for the perfect opportunity to make his escape.

It was different now. Sam would not fight for himself, but he would fight for Rolo’s sake. Rolo, who didn’t have a cruel bone in his body. Rolo, who was already so much faded from even what he’d been on his first day in this facility. Rolo, who wasted away, who shut down, who closed his eyes whenever the footsteps approached their cell and let himself be taken away to further experiments.

Rolo didn’t deserve this.

Sam was no warrior. He’d been an old man before all this, still fit but well past his prime. Kerberos likely would have been his last mission, and Kerberos wasn’t supposed to involve alien soldiers and a fight for survival.

Sam was no warrior, and he didn’t have the strength to stop the guards from taking Rolo away. But he had his mind, and his mind had not broken during the long, cold months of his captivity. He was a scientist, a scholar. It was curiosity that had drawn him to the Garrison, curiosity and a thirst for the unknown that pulled him out into space.

He was Commander Samuel Holt, Chief Science Officer for the _Persephone_ , and the druids had no clue how great a weapon they’d handed him when they made him one of their test subjects.

Twenty minutes had passed since they’d taken Rolo. The footsteps had long since faded, the prison settled back to its familiar symphony of dripping water and howling wind. Somewhere, distantly, another lonely victim of Project Robeast cried into the uncaring silence.

Sam knelt in the center of his cell, hands on his knees, focused only on his breathing. He felt every inch of his body—the cold stone beneath his knees, the coarse, thin fabric beneath his fingertips, the matted hair that hung limp against his ears and neck. He perceived his body, dwelt in his aches.

And then he reached outside himself.

Around him was darkness as deep as space itself. A void of light, of life. Sam hadn’t known what he was doing, when he first discovered he could do it, but his captors certainly had. They’d put safeguards in place, stripped his prison of anything he might turn to his advantage. In their place, they installed metal doors, living guards, locks that turned with keys instead of biometrics or codes. A primitive prison, considering how advanced the Galra were.

For a hundred feet in all directions, there was nothing more technologically advanced than a clock—and even those, guards were told not to count on as true.

They hadn’t yet realized Sam’s mind could reach farther now than it had three months ago.

He breathed, and stepped beyond the darkness. Here he found machines aplenty. Doors that ran on the strange, slick energy of these aliens; communicators that reached farther than anything humans had yet built; weapons that hummed with restless energy, thirsty for their next kill.

He came quickly to the laboratory. He’d been there often enough—mostly sedated, these days, though that only helped his mind to wander—and he knew his way around. He found the door controls, the lighting, the computers that stored data from the druids’ experiments, but he left all these alone. If they knew Sam had access to their tech, they would move him somewhere still farther away, and it would take him months to build up his reach again. Months he just didn’t have.

He lingered a moment on the _thing_ they were constructing— _growing—_ in the heart of the lab. If he destroyed that, how far might he set back this project of theirs?

How much might they punish their prisoners for the setback? Sam could take whatever they dished out—but Rolo? Rolo didn’t deserve what suffering he’d already had forced upon him. Sam couldn’t pour any more into him, not even if it might buy them both a little more time.

 _Subtlety,_ Sam reminded himself. _Don’t let them see your touch._

He sank into the device they had Rolo hooked up to. For all his poking around in the inner workings of the lab, Sam hadn’t yet discerned what this device was supposed to accomplish. As far as he could tell, it existed to inflict pain, and to measure the effect of that pain upon the body.

It also consumed a tremendous amount of power—almost more than the station could produce. Sam could feel it in his bones: flickers at the tips of his fingers, patches where everything ran thin. He _pushed_ ; he couldn’t describe exactly how. All he knew was that he bent his mind toward the machinery, and the machinery responded. A power surge here, a slight uptick in resistance there. A dozen small adjustments, each too minor to draw suspicion, but they added up.

Sam started a new process on the main computers—a slight flaw in the programming, already written into the code but overlooked when they were accounting for the power supply.

That tipped the balance, plunging the room into darkness.

With the power failure, Sam no longer had a way to peer into the lab, and so he retreated into himself, focusing once more on breathing, counting the seconds until the footsteps returned. He shifted so he no longer sat at attention in the center of the room but huddled in the corner, cowering as the guards threw open the door.

Rolo came staggering in, the shoddy prosthetic leg they’d given him slipping on the bare stone floor. Sam lunged forward to break his fall, cringing as the guards brandished their weapons. He ducked his head, twisting to put as much of himself between Rolo and the door as he could, and waited, tense, until the guards retreated.

“What happened?” Sam asked, praying his intervention hadn’t made things worse.

“Dunno.” Rolo shifted, pushing himself up off the floor. He didn’t fight it when Sam guided him toward the wall and settled them both, Sam sitting upright, Rolo lying with his head on Sam’s thigh. “Must’ve overloaded the system somehow. They barely got things going before the whole place went dark. They’ll be back later, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure,” Sam said, releasing a minute sigh of relief. “But that’s later. For now, get some rest. You need to keep your strength up.”

Rolo laughed dryly. “For what? You think somebody’s gonna come rescue us way out here?”

 _Or we’ll rescue ourselves,_ Sam thought. He didn’t dare speak it aloud. There were no recorders in these cells, no hidden cameras or comms systems eavesdropping on him—but whatever the druids had done to him only worked on technology, and he knew too well it couldn’t lay a finger on their magic.

That, and he didn’t dare raise Rolo’s hopes for nothing.

“You never know, son,” Sam whispered, running his fingers through Rolo’s hair. “You never know.”


	7. Return to New Altea

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The paladins successfully rescued the crew of the Red Swiftling, securing a military alliance with New Altea. The victory was bittersweet for the paladins' families, however. Karen is edging toward an explosion, and Akira, wracked with guilt over not helping more during the battle, decided to tackle the gladiator, alone, on level five. It didn't go well. Meanwhile, Matt and Val asked Keturah's AI for advice on training in Pygnarat magic, but this stirred up old hurts for Meri, who fled the room and had a talk with Ryner about grief.
> 
> Oh, and Sam Holt is a technopath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a new fic up, in case you missed it! [Where Light and Dark Meet](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12663330/chapters/28863255) is a fantasy AU about curses, prophecies, and an eclipse featuring Lance getting up to shenanigans as a cat, Keith as a grumpy crow, and... translation errors? Anyway, check it out if that's your thing.
> 
> In other news, we're heading into the holidays, which means there's a better than even chance that I'm going to be running short on writing time. In order to not run out of buffer in the middle of the run-up to the end of part one, I'm probably going to be taking a week or two off after the next chapter. As always, I'll keep you updated on Tumblr [@squirenonny](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com). In the mean time, I hope you all enjoy this chapter!

“I want to thank you all for your support. Every person who stands with us makes us stronger. Every voice that joins with ours helps us to rise above the lies the Zarkon feeds the universe. Together, we are stronger—strong enough to make a change.”

Allura’s amplified voice rang out over the plaza, where a crowd of New Alteans had gathered, Karen and Eli at the back. They’d arrived on New Altea early yesterday morning to a veritable swarm of civilians and enthusiastic volunteers, and Shiro, Allura, and Coran had spent the better part of the day ironing out details of the treaty with the Council.

Today, the first wave of reinforcements and engineers were on their way to Earth to begin construction on a set of planetary rings that, like New Altea’s, would provide a more solid defense than any fleet. The Senate was scheduled to vote on the treaty in three day’s time, which meant Coran, Akira, and Layeni had time to sort through the dozens upon dozens of applications sent in by New Alteans who wanted to join the Voltron Guard or castle staff.

That left the paladins to get out and explore the city, meeting with the citizens of New Altea in both formal and informal settings. Karen hadn’t planned on coming out today, but Eli had wanted to support Hunk. He cheered and whistled at all the right moments, his grin never leaving his face as Hunk helped retell stories of Voltron’s victories and posed for pictures with citizens.

Karen mostly just felt sick.

It wasn’t that the New Alteans showed up in droves to join the budding army. It wasn’t that this treaty ensured that Pidge and Matt would continue to fight for a long while to come. It wasn’t even that over the course of the last hour, Karen had heard far too many stories about what her children had faced out there in space.

It was the way everyone responded with smiles and enthusiasm, as though this were a parade and not a matter of life and death.

She turned as Allura’s speech wound down, the paladins dispersing to speak with the crowd, as they’d already spoken with three other gatherings today. Eli was still beaming at Hunk, but his smile faded as he caught sight of the storm on Karen’s face.

“You okay?” he asked.

Karen stopped, closing her eyes as she fought down a wave of undirected anger. “No, I’m not okay, Eli. I can’t wrap my head around any of this.”

Eli shrugged, following Karen to a quiet space at the edge of the plaza, away from the crowd surging forward to meet the paladins. Other Galra and Alteans were already streaming away, chattering animatedly about Voltron and the war and the legends of old.

“Karen,” Eli said gently, leaning back against a waist-high stone wall topped with ivy-like shrubs. “Look at them. Our kids are making a difference in the universe. They’re spreading hope. They’re convincing other people to take a stand against Zarkon! That’s pretty amazing.”

Stomach turning over, Karen shook her head. “But look at _how_ they’re doing all that. All the fighting, all the risk. Are you seriously telling me you aren’t sick to your stomach when you have to stand there and watch your nephew fight?”

Eli dropped his gaze, his smile faltering. “Of course I’m worried about him. More than worried.” For a moment, Eli looked nearly as nauseous as Karen, and he glanced once toward the paladins on the far side of the plaza. “But he’s doing the right thing. He’s doing what he can. I honestly believe that.”

“So you’re just going to sit up on the bridge, day in and day out, praying today isn’t the day he dies.”

“No.” Eli turned back to her, smile going thin. “I’m going to help. I’m not sure how yet. I’m not sure if the castle-ship is even the best place to do it from. But I’m going to figure out my place in all this.”

Karen turned her head, scrutinizing him. “What do you mean, the best place to help from?”

“Well. Lana and I have been talking. And she’s been talking to the Mendozas.” Eli scratched the side of his face, not meeting Karen’s eyes. “Nothing’s decided yet, of course, but… Kolivan offered us housing here. Housing and a stipend. We’d be able to stay in touch with the kids, but we wouldn’t have to be out in all that.”

Karen couldn’t believe her ears. “And you’re going to take him up on it. Just… walk away, leave Hunk to fend for himself.”

“He’s doing that anyway, Karen.” Eli held up his hands. “I haven’t decided anything yet. But I think it’s worth considering. For our sake and for theirs. Sure, we’re there to hug them after battle, to take care of them if they get hurt—but if we’re putting them under more stress just by being there, by making them second guess everything they do… Maybe it’s a good idea for some of us to step back.”

And by _some of us_ , of course, he meant Karen. She scowled at him, hurt and indignation simmering in her chest. “Do what you need to, Eli. It’s not my place to tell you what’s best for your family.”

His lips tightened, but he bit down on whatever retort he wanted to make--and he _did_ want to strike back at her. She could tell. He breathed deeply, nostrils flaring. "Karen." He reached out a hand and rested it on her arm. "I understand why you're upset about all this. I _do._ But... Hell, Karen, I don't know. Don't you think it might be worthwhile to try to understand where your kids are coming from? Where Allura and Coran and the rest of the team is coming from? What's happening here is happening on a scale that I can't even comprehend, and maybe that doesn't make it okay, but I don't think there is a perfect option here. No matter what happens, we're going to have to learn to deal with what the universe dropped into our laps."

Karen squeezed her eyes shut against a surge of pain. No, there was no perfect solution. There rarely was, but in this case, everything seemed sharper. What did she do when faced with a choice like this? Keep Pidge safe even if it meant they hated her? Let them take these risks knowing they could always come to her when they needed help? Karen had thought she'd made the right decision in letting Pidge sneak into the Garrison, but if she'd kept them safe back then, would either of them be in this mess?

(Matt would. Whatever difference Karen might have made in Pidge's life, she couldn't have stopped what happened to Matt. So then, what? Would she have traded Pidge's safety for Matt's?)

Eli's hand slipped away, and Karen opened her eyes to find him watching the paladins. Hunk and Shay were laughing and chatting with a couple of Galra who seemed to have made them both crowns of ivy. Not far from them, Pidge and Matt had gone wide-eyed over a gift from an Altean that appeared to be a box of chocolates. Pidge popped one in their mouth and all but melted, frantically calling to the other paladins to come and try for themselves.

Shiro stood alone a little way from the others, smiling fondly at them and chatting politely with New Alteans who passed by, but making no effort to wade into the furor.

Eli glanced at Karen. "You trust him."

"What?"

"Shiro." Eli ran his fingers through his hair. "You trust, him, don't you? The way you talk about him, the way he and Matt talk about each other, he's practically family. He cares about Pidge. He wants to keep them safe--but he lets them fight. More than that, he's in charge of the paladins as much as Princess Allura. Seems like the two of them even outrank Coran." There was the slightest edge to this statement, and Karen felt her hackles rise.

 _I know they're in charge,_ she wanted to say. _But they're hardly more than children themselves._

She held her tongue, not least of all because she knew her logic was frail. She needed someone to blame, but she liked Shiro and she pitied Allura. So her anger fell on Coran. It wasn't fair to any of them, but she couldn't help it. Logic took a backseat when her children were in danger.

"Talk to Shiro," Eli said. "I think it would do you some good."

Karen hesitated for a long moment, but Eli was right. She couldn't keep on like this, and she _did_ trust Shiro. She doubted he could say anything that would make her feel better about this war, but she owed it to her children to try.

* * *

Coran waited until Zelka left to catalogue systems in need of maintenance before he broached the subject that had been on his mind all day.

“I spoke with the Council today,” he said softly, placing a hand on Wyn’s shoulder. Allura was the only other one on the bridge at the moment, since Coran had given Tev a day off. He and most of the other refugees from Revinor were off exploring New Altea with Jana, but once again Wyn had declined to leave the castle-ship. Coran had a suspicion there was more to it than simply not wanting to walk the length of the city several times over.

Wyn squirmed under Coran’s touch, his eyes darting toward the door. “About what?” he asked.

Coran’s brow furrowed, and he leaned back against a control panel, struggling to keep his expression neutral. “About you. Someone mentioned that those who leave New Altea forfeit the right to return.”

“Yeah...” Wyn crossed his arms, glaring at the floor. “So?”

Allura looked up at Coran with a grimace of sympathy, and Coran sighed. “Wyn,” he said. “You can be honest with me. Was that why you were so desperate to be allowed to stay on the castle-ship? Because you thought you had nowhere else to go?”

“What does it matter? You already said I could stay." Wyn's eyebrows twitched together, and he glanced upward, his arms wrapping around his stomach. "You didn’t change your mind, did you?”

“No.” Coran’s voice was heavy and pained, but he stooped down to catch Wyn’s eye. “Wyn, I will _never_ turn you out. Never. But you do understand that you will be in danger as long as you are here… don’t you? The Council has extended amnesty for you and for the people we rescued from the _Red Swiftling._ That means you can stay, if you want to. You could go and live with Jana—I’m sure she’d be happy to have you.”

Wyn shook his head. “I don’t want to leave.”

Coran was silent for a long moment, considering him. “It would not be a mark against you if you did. After all you’ve been through, I think it’s only natural you want to be somewhere safe. Many of the refugees from Revinor will be staying on New Altea, you know.”

“Maka and Edi are staying here, though,” Wyn countered. “And Dagmar, and Bee, and Zuza… It’s only the little kids who are going. Azra and Tik and them.”

Allura seemed to be fighting the urge to point out that Tik wasn’t all that much younger than any of the others, Wyn included. Coran was fighting that urge himself. As much as he loved having the children on board, he couldn’t help but see the risk. The universe was a more dangerous place than it had been ten thousand years ago, and Voltron faced more imposing challenges. Coran wouldn’t have complained if every child on the castle packed up and left.

He said nothing of the sort, of course, just placed his hand on the crown of Wyn’s head. “As I said. I’m not going to force you out. I only want to be sure you don’t feel you _must_ stay here.”

“I understand,” Wyn said in a low voice. “I still want to stay.”

“Okay then,” Coran said. “Why don’t we go see how Lieutenant Zelka’s doing with the survey, hm?” He straightened, guiding Wyn toward the door with a hand on his back. Coran and Allura locked eyes over Wyn’s head, trading looks of mingled fondness and sorrow. This war had stolen too much innocence, but there was nothing for it but to press forward, accepting what help was offered.

They would see Zarkon dead, his empire in ruins at his feet. They would ensure no one else had to sacrifice their childhood to this fight.

* * *

“With all this fancy alien technology, you’d think someone would’ve figured out an easier way to do this,” Val said, passing a crate full of fabric to Lance, who settled it into a hovering card beside several other crates of supplies. Val had stopped asking what was in all the crates an hour ago—food and fabric and spare parts and batteries and who knew what else, half of it donated by the people of New Altea, half of it purchased.

There was a lot of manual labor to do before the castle could head back out to the fight—loading up, cleaning up, ironing out the nitty-gritty with the New Altean bourgeoisie—and most of it fell on the paladins’ shoulders. Shiro and Allura, of course, were on PR duty, Hunk, Matt, and the Greens assigned to repairs. Val, Nyma, and Lance were loading supplies, and Val couldn’t decide whether it was better or worse than the janitorial duty that had fallen to Keith, Shay, and Meri.

“Easier?” Nyma asked. “Sure. If you’ve got a million GAC to spend on the set-up, a couple of quintants to get it all running, the patience of a Balmera to sort out all the bugs, and about twice as much room to work.”

Val wrinkled her nose. “Okay, point taken.” She turned to grab the next crate in the stack, but this was heavier than the last several, and when she turned to lift it up to Lance, something in her shoulder shifted, grinding against bone. She yelped, losing her grip on the crate, and winced as it hit the ground and burst open, spilling electronic gadgets everywhere.

“Damn it,” Val muttered, crouching on aching knees to gather it up. Lance leaped down to help her, and Nyma chased down a pair of metal spheres that had gone skittering away from the rest. “Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Lance said, setting the crate on the lip of the loading dock where they were working. “You okay?”

Val waved a hand, trying not to make a big deal of massaging her shoulder. “Space arthritis,” she said with a flippant smile. “Whatcha gonna do?”

Lance’s brows furrowed, and he glanced to Nyma, who had her hips cocked, the arch of her eyebrow asking whether Val wanted to try that explanation again.

Val rolled her eyes and went to grab the next crate. Her shoulder protested the load, but now that she was expecting it, she could power through. “It’s fine. I’ll grab a massage from Shay when we’re done, and we’ll be right as rain by dinner!”

Neither of them said anything to that, so after placing the third crate up on the loading dock, Val climbed up herself and transferred them all over to the cart. It was a short walk back to the storage hub, where she scanned the ID chip stamped onto each crate. The computer logged its contents, then stored the crate in one of the dozens of little cubbies that lined the walls.

Lance and Nyma were talking in low tones when she returned, but split apart when they caught sight of her. Resentment curdled in Val’s gut at the sight, but she shoved it down and flashed a smile as she pushed the hover-cart back to the edge of the dock. “Looks like we’re almost done,” she said, surveying the crates still waiting on the tarmac. “That’s, what, two more loads?”

“Probably,” Nyma said. She grabbed a crate and settled it on her hip. “We can finish up here if you want to go find Shay now.”

Val’s smile turned brittle. “It’s okay,” she said cheerfully. “I can wait twenty minutes.”

Lance and Nyma exchanged another look, the kind that said they didn’t trust Val to know her own limits, and she huffed.

“Seriously,” she said. “It’s no big deal. Like stubbing my toe.”

They didn’t look convinced, but Nyma just shrugged and passed Val the crate. Neither of them spoke again for another five minutes, and when Lance finally broke his silence, it was with a thin, feeble cheer that sounded nothing like him.

“So. How’s Hogwarts?”

“You mean the thing with Matt?” Val grunted, letting the crate fall into the cart before squaring it up. “Could be better.”

“No breakthroughs?”

“I’m not creating living snowmen and bursting into song, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Lance crossed his arms on top of the next crate he set on the loading dock, frowning up at her. “You’ll get there, Prima Donna.”

His earnestness soothed away some of the restlessness burrowing in behind her sternum, and the next smile she attempted felt a little more genuine. “That’s what I keep telling myself.” She pulled Lance’s crate away from him, nearly making him face-plant into the loading dock. “Now are you going to help me load this shit or not?”

Thankfully, he dropped the issue, and they finished the work without discussing anything more pressing than what they were going to do for dinner.

Val pretended not to see the worried looks that chased her out of the dock when she finally went off in search of Shay.

* * *

“We got the air cycler in the Green Tower up and running again,” Pidge said. “Hunk’s fixing up the last of the issues with the water purifier, and Ryner’s running a few diagnostics.” They hopped up onto the dash where Coran was working, leaning back on their hands. “I think once Matt’s done scoping out the Yellow Tower, we’re gonna call it a day.”

“We have all the supplies we need?” Coran asked.

“And enough extra material for me and Ryner to make anything we forgot,” Pidge said, flashing a smile. “And all the external work is done, so we should be good to finish up the last of it on the trip to the edge of the defensive zone. Are you guys done with hiring?”

Coran smoothed his mustache down, looking more than a little overwhelmed. “I’m not sure we’ll ever be done with that, to be honest. Did you hear we received another two dozen applicants today?”

“Everybody wants to be at war, apparently.”

Coran chuckled, then went back to fiddling with whatever he’d been studying on the screen. It had been a long couple of days for all of them, and the treaty’s ratification this morning had kicked them into high gear. New Altea was now officially part of the Voltron Coalition, and the paladins—when not working their asses off to get everything ready for departure—were roped into one public appearance after another.

In all honesty, Pidge was ready to be away from here and back out in deep space where everything made sense.

“So what’s the final count?”

Coran scrolled to the bottom of his current document, then closed it and opened a new window. “Thirty new pilots for the Voltron Guard—half of them ready for immediate deployment, half undergoing, ah, what did they call it, boot camp?” He enunciated the words clearly, then shrugged. “Some sort of training regimen with Layeni. Then… let’s see here. Sixteen engineers and mechanics, mostly to give the Guard ships a good once-over, but also to keep the rest of the castle up and running; I suspect some of them will end up on the bridge crew sooner or later. And a dozen administrators, medical staff, and operations. Cooking and cleaning and all that. A handful are bringing families along, though not as many as I’d have expected. All together, we’re gaining eighty-one new residents.”

“And losing, what, a dozen?”

Coran frowned. “I wouldn’t say we’re _losing_ them. They’ll just be staying on the ground.”

“Semantics.” Pidge waved a hand. “Either way, it’s gonna be a lot more lively around here.”

Coran’s lips quirked into a smile, his eyes catching Pidge’s and shining. “Indeed it is,” he said. “It will almost be like old times.”

Pidge returned the smile, something close to pain thrumming inside them. The sense of _rightness_ settled over them—a heavy sensation, and comforting. This was what they were meant to be doing. This was what they _wanted_ to do. Help people. Inspire people. A couple of years ago, their grandest aspiration had been, _I dunno, maybe space someday?_

Now they wanted to see the universe free from Zarkon’s influence.

Perhaps the most surprising part of this realization was that they _wanted_ to fight. Not for the violence of it—that part still sometimes horrified them, with the cold, creeping sort of horror that snuck up on them in the dead of night. But they wanted to be there. They wanted to be a paladin. They’d never felt quite so alive as they had on the way back from the _Red Swiftling,_ heart racing, a dozen refugees crowded in around them. They’d _saved lives._

Pidge didn’t want to stop. They couldn’t stop.

Now they just had to get their mother to see sense.

As though Pidge’s thoughts had summoned her, Karen appeared just then in the doorway, her shoulders level, her lips pressed together. Eli stood just behind her, a hand on her shoulder. He whispered something to her, but she shook her head, and Eli left. Pidge fought the urge to shrink down at the sight of their mother striding forward like a thunderhead. They’d avoided her as much as they could since the battle for the _Swiftling_ , and they’d managed not to ever wind up alone with her. Mostly they saw each other at dinner, where Pidge could use the other paladins as a buffer. Karen was always up early, sometimes as early as an hour or two after Pidge finally turned in, and their drastically different schedules helped with the whole avoidance routine.

Pidge supposed they shouldn’t have expected it to last forever.

“Mom,” they said, standing up but not moving away from the console. The motion of Coran’s fingers slowed for a moment, but he didn’t look away from his screen. Pidge licked their lips. “Did Hunk tell you where to find me?”

Karen blinked, staring at Pidge for a long moment before shaking her head. “Actually, I wasn’t expecting to find you here. Is everything… all right?”

“Fine.” Pidge frowned, then glanced at Coran, who squeezed his eyes shut, and turned around.

“Hello, Karen.”

“Coran.” Karen drew herself up, then wrapped her arms around herself. “I wanted to apologize for the way I’ve been acting.”

Coran gave a start, and Pidge’s jaw actually dropped. “Mom?” they asked, stunned. “Are _you_ feeling okay?”

Karen pursed her lips. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m still not happy with this arrangement. But I realize I was… out of line.” She hesitated, stern facade faltering. “I spoke with Shiro about what’s been going on. I’ve known him for some time now, and he’s always been a reasonable man. I found it hard to believe that he could be okay with sending you out there.”

“And… what did he say?”

Gaze sliding to the empty paladins’ stations beside her, Karen forced a smile. “He said you’d saved multiple inhabited worlds more or less single-handedly before he joined the team. He said Coran is one of the most selfless people he’s ever known. And he said he would do everything in his power to keep you safe, but he would not ask you to step down.”

Pidge was flattered, and a surge of gratitude pooled in their gut. “And…?”

“ _And?_ ” Karen’s voice ticked upward by several steps, a frantic note entering it. “Pidge, _look_ at yourself. You’re charging into enemy territory all on your own, facing down enemies who could kill you in an instant. How are you okay with that?”

“Because I have to be.”

Karen flinched, but recovered quickly. “I’ve been talking with the other families. Some of them are thinking of staying on New Altea for a time. It’s more defensible than Earth, and we wouldn’t have to worry about going into battle every day.”

Pidge’s stomach clenched. They’d heard the whispers, of course. Nothing was certain yet, but they knew some of the others’ families had been deliberating. Lance kept going on about how it would be better for Luz and Mateo, and he seemed determined not to acknowledge the sorrow the other paladins could see in him. “What are you saying?”

“I’m staying here,” Karen said. “I can’t watch you put yourself at risk like this every single day. I _can’t_. But I can’t stop you, any more than I could stop you from enrolling at the Garrison to look for your father and brother. I—I know if I try, I’m only going to ruin our relationship.”

“Mom...” Pidge trailed off, a lump in their throat. They swallowed against it, blinking furiously as their eyes tried to water. They wanted to argue, wanted to tell their mother to stay. _I only just got you back. I can’t find Dad. I don’t want to lose you again, too._

They stayed quiet.

Karen’s next breath wavered. “I’ll still do what I can to help. Shiro mentioned that your coalition could use a legal expert for future treaties. I think he expected me to be with you for that, but I can research intergalactic law just as well from New Altea. The Council gave you their encryption keys, didn’t they? So we can talk?”

Coran nodded somberly. “They did. I can get you a comms unit before you go.”

“Thank you, Coran. And—take care of them for me, all right? Bring my kids home safe.”

"I swear it on my life,” Coran said.

Karen smiled tearfully, then turned and headed for the door, her steps rushed, as though she meant to leave before she could take back her decision. Pidge watched, frozen, for several painful seconds, then swore and took off after her.

“Mom!” they cried. Karen stopped in the corridor just outside the bridge, turning just in time for Pidge to crash into her, their arms locking around her waist. “You’re sure about this?” they whispered.

Karen kissed the top of their head. “I am,” she said. “It’s tearing me apart, watching you go into battle. I… I think I’m beginning to understand why you have to do it, and I certainly see that I’m on the losing side of this argument. The best thing I can do now is step back—at least for a little while.”

Pidge’s tears welled over, and they turned their face into Karen’s shoulder. “I’m going to miss you.”

“I’ll miss you, too, Pidge.” Karen’s voice wobbled. “Promise me you’ll call. I want to know you're okay.”

“Every day," they promised, voice hoarse. "We’ll be back, Mom. We’re going to find Dad, stop Zarkon, and then we’ll all go home.”

Karen’s hold turned vice-like, and she clung to Pidge for a long, breathless moment before stepping back. “I know you will, Pidge.” She sniffled once, and smiled. “Now I need to go find your brother and say goodbye. Be careful out there. I love you, Pidge.”

“I love you too, Mom.”

* * *

Thace was suffocating.

The politics, the bureaucracy, the secrecy—he wouldn’t have thought it possible, but he hated it. After twenty years of spying and all that it entailed, he found himself chafing under the critical eyes of his new neighbors.

“Oh! Thace.” Keena spun toward him, her ridiculous magenta hair fanning out around her head. She looked like a woman twenty years younger, and she acted like it too, at least when they were out in public. “I need you to pick up some tchoss for me tomorrow, okay?”

Everything about her demeanor plucked at him, agitating the dark memories that kept him up at night. How could she act like this? All bubbly and bright, as though she hadn’t killed innocents in the name of the mission—it defied logic. Thace knew too well the horrors they’d enacted in the name of the mission. It had all been necessary, and Thace would have gone on doing it for years if he hadn’t blown his cover, but he didn’t think he’d ever be able to giggle and flounce about like his sister did.

 _All part of the act,_ she’d told him. She was Spymaster of the Accords, but only the Council and her own highest ranked operatives knew her by name. She wore her hair like a kit would, dressed in gauzy dresses more suited to the club than a grocery store, and hung off him like an Anuvin in a jungle to throw off suspicion.

Thace couldn’t do the same. The longer he was here, surrounded by unfriendly eyes that stirred too many memories of those who would have killed him in an instant if they saw to his core, the more he wanted to spill his story for all to hear. Better that they hate him for what he’d done than regard him like a living nightmare because of the whispers that stalked _asothra_ like a hunting beast.

“Thace?” Keena tipped her head to one side, her expression vague. Her eyes, though, burned as brightly as ever, pinning him through. “Did you hear me?”

Thace glanced over his shoulder, feeling the drag of eyes across his neck. “I heard.”

“And?”

Sighing, Thace pulled his eyes off the unknown threats lurking in the anonymous crowd and fixed Keena with an exasperated look. He dredged up the list of codes she’d provided him with when he returned with the paladins. Groceries, chores, and other mundane requests—dozens of them—all layered over with clandestine meanings she expected him to keep track of.

“I’m _tired_ , Keena,” he said, trying to impress on her that he meant it in more than one sense. True, he hadn’t slept well last night—hadn’t slept well since arriving on New Altea, in all honesty. If he wasn’t woken by dreams of druids coming for him, of his victims rising from the grave to have their vengeance, then it was thoughts of his nephew that kept him up. He couldn’t unsee the horror that had answered Keena’s giddy plan. He couldn’t stop berating himself for saying nothing to contradict her. She should have told him what she intended before she sprung it on Keith.

He should have stopped her once he knew.

But it was more than a merely physical exhaustion that plagued him. Twenty years he’d served New Altea. Twenty years risking his life for a planet he’d never set foot on. He’d been brought in as so many _asothra_ were brought in—an operative had recruited Keena in the field, and she'd dragged Thace down with her. They’d both been caught up in the promise of a world untouched by Zarkon’s poison.

True, Thace had grown jaded over the years. He’d tried to keep his expectations reasonable, tried to downplay the tales of utopia that surrounded New Altea. But he’d downplayed them in all the wrong ways. New Altea was a gorgeous planet, reasonably prosperous. Not without social ills—few worlds were—but several steps above anywhere Thace had visited within the Empire.

And he wasn’t welcome here.

He could see it in the eyes of neighbors who came out to see the new arrival, in the way the clerks at the seldom-used Immigration Office regarded him with something like fear. It was almost enough to make him believe they all knew of the Proof.

And Thace was _tired._

Keena’s cheerful expression never faltered, but she drifted closer to him. It was as close as she came to genuine concern, and Thace found it cloying.

 _Drop the act,_ he wanted to scream at her. _For once in your life, just be honest with me._

But they were in public; asking for honesty now was an exercise in futility. So Thace sighed and resigned himself to another painfully long shopping trip. Thace didn’t even know what happened to all this food: if it would be split up and distributed to other off-duty (or “off-duty”) agents in the city as secretive messages, if the purchase itself was a message for someone here in the store. It seemed everything Keena did had two or three layers of significance to it, and Thace couldn’t scrounge up the brain power to sort it all out.

When they left the store, Thace’s eyes went at once to the towering form of the Castle of Lions on the horizon. It overshadowed ninety percent of the buildings in New Alafor, so it would have drawn the eye even if it didn’t serve as a beacon proclaiming Keith’s location.

_How much longer until they leave, I wonder?_

Thace turned away, watching the shadows between the buildings as he followed Keena to the nondescript apartment they shared. Here, at least, Thace found evidence that he wasn’t the only one scarred by his time in Zarkon’s army. Keena had replaced the standard locks with biometrics, then added two manual locks on top of that.

Thace checked them all twice, then crossed the front room—avoiding the window—to help Keena put away the groceries.

“Not sleeping well?” Keena asked brightly, and Thace almost had to laugh. Even in her own home, she didn’t quite let her guard down. Her office and the briefing rooms at the Accords headquarters were the only places she spoke unfiltered truth—and even then, not always.

Suddenly, Thace found he didn’t have the patience to play her games.

“Nightmares,” he said bluntly. “I didn’t make it out this time.”

Keena froze, up on her toes to put away a tea tin. She breathed a few times, deliberately, and flicked her ear in annoyance. “You know Ura, from downstairs? She says vissroot is good for insomnia. We should get some next time we’re in the suburbs.”

Unbidden, Keena’s code rose in his mind.

“Ura, from downstairs.” _We can’t trust the neighbors._

“Vissroot.” _Security protocol. Stop what you’re doing and await new orders._

“Next time we’re in the suburbs.” _We’ll talk later._

Thace slammed a jar of pickled kergs down onto the counter, gut clenching at the shriek of cracking glass—too much like the shriek of druidic lightning. He screwed his eyes shut and breathed, sinking his claws into the countertop to ground himself. This was New Altea, not an Imperial ship. He was safe.

“I can’t do this, Keena,” he said.

She made an unhappy sound on the verge of a growl. “What are you talking about?”

Thace spun, gesturing wide. “ _This._ I’m done spying, Keena. I almost _died._ I just want to rest, okay?”

Keena’s face darkened. She glanced around, then stepped toward him, dropping her voice low. “Don’t do this to me, Thace. You’re one of the only people I can trust here.”

“ _No_ , Keena.” He pushed her away, his heart skipping a beat. She was too close, too present, the heat of her body and the light in her eyes making his skin crawl with imagined hands that grasped at him, dragging him down, leveling rifles at his head. Thace backpedaled, his throat tight. “I’m done, Keena,” he said, fumbling with the locks as Keena chased after him. Old instincts reared their head, and he had to remind himself his sister was not the enemy. His hands shook now more than ever, and he failed twice to undo the chain below the deadbolt.

“Where are you going, Thace?” Keena asked.

He turned, wrenching the door open as he did. “To Keith,” he said. “If he’ll have me.”

He left before Keena could recover her voice.

* * *

“Keith! Wait a moment. Please.”

Keith froze, Thace’s voice making his skin go tight. Three days he’d been here, sticking close to the castle and the other paladins, watching crowds for signs of Thace and Keena. It wasn’t that he was scared of them. He just didn’t want to see them.

And now here Thace was, his footsteps light as he crossed the pavement toward Keith. Just ahead, Shiro stopped and turned, his gaze darting to Thace before settling on Keith. Concerned. Expectant.

Keith closed his eyes, trying just to breathe. Was his mother here, too? Gods he hoped not.

The footsteps slowed.

Keith turned, crossing his arms as he stared Thace down. (Just Thace. Keith began to breathe again.) “What do you want?”

Shiro edged closer to Keith, a welcome reminder that he wasn’t alone this time.

Thace glanced at Shiro just long enough to give Keith the impression that he was minding his words, then focused on Keith and inclined his head. “You are leaving New Altea soon, are you not?”

“Just finishing our final preparations,” Shiro said once it became obvious Keith wasn’t going to volunteer the information. “Zarkon isn’t going to wait around for long; we need to be out there ready to meet him when he strikes.”

“Of course,” said Thace.

Shiro eased forward another inch or so, a subtle shift that put him slightly ahead of Keith, almost like a physical buffer between him and Thace. “Did you need something?”

Thace pursed his lips. “I was thinking of asking the princess to allow me to accompany you.”

The ice that had been flooding Keith’s veins evaporated in a flash, replaced with liquid fire. His arms dropped to his sides, hands grasping for a weapon that wasn’t there—he still carried only his mother’s knife, her sword locked away in the bottom of his closet on the castle-ship. That was for the best. He didn’t need to be drawing a weapon on his uncle out here in the middle of the airfield.

“Okay,” Keith said, aware of the growl that entered his voice but unable to smooth it away. “Then why aren’t you asking _her_?”

“Because,” Thace said. “I wanted to be sure you were okay with that before I did.”

Keith’s mounting rage fizzled, confusion stealing the bite from his panic. He stared at Thace, repeating the words in his head. Something about them refused to make sense—maybe the deference with which Thace spoke, maybe just the fact that he _cared_ what Keith thought.

He could have cared what Keith thought of his mother's mission.

“I… What?”

Thace clasped his hands behind his back, his face going oddly blank, his eyes not quite meeting Keith’s. It was a familiar pose, a familiar uncertainty, and for the first time, Keith found himself really looking at his uncle. There was strain around his eyes, a dull quality to his fur that spoke of either poor nutrition or a prolonged lack of sleep. He held himself back, no more eager than Keith to bridge the distance between them.

“Are you okay with me being here?” Thace asked. “If not, I will go. Altea knows I have no right to ask of you any favors.”

Shiro’s fingers reached out to brush the back of Keith’s shoulder and he turned. There was weight behind Shiro’s eyes. _What do you want from me?_ Keith wanted to ask. _Do you want me to forgive him, or to send him away?_

 _Was_ there anything to forgive him for? He hadn’t left Keith the way Keena had; he just hadn’t stepped in to help him. It _hurt_ , but it wasn’t _wrong_. It wasn’t— _Thace wasn’t_ \--

Keith stepped back, one arm curling around his roiling stomach. “I don’t care what you do,” Keith said. “If Allura’s okay with you coming, I’m not going to stop you. Just don’t--” _Don’t ask me to do what she wants me to do._

Thace’s sharp gaze pinned Keith, stripping away layers of his defenses, until it seemed Thace was looking straight to the heart of him. “I am not your mother. I understand why she thinks… certain things are necessary.” He paused, his face growing dark. “That doesn’t mean I agree.”

Breathless, Keith watched him, searching for signs of deception, signs that Thace, like Keena, thought Keith every bit the monster Zarkon was. This wasn’t a promise that it wouldn’t come to that. It wasn’t a promise that Thace would support Keith if he defied his mother’s request.

But it was a lifeline, and Keith clung to it with all his might.

“Allura should be in the main hall,” he said, ducking his head. “She and Coran are getting everyone settled.”

"Thank you,” Thace said, and there was genuine relief in his voice. Keith waited until he walked past, then turned and watched him go, an odd longing taking root in the pit of his stomach.

“He’s a good man,” Shiro said, his eyes fixed on the side of Keith’s head. “I don’t think he wants to hurt you.”

Keith shook his head. No, he didn’t think Thace wanted that. He didn’t think _Keena_ wanted that. All either of them wanted was to make the universe a better place, and to pull Zarkon down from his throne. Keith just hoped he wasn’t going to end up as collateral damage.

He turned, looping around the castle-ship toward the Red Lion’s hangar rather than follow Thace in through the front door. “Come on,” he said. “We should make sure everything’s ready to go.”

* * *

Twenty minutes before Karen planned to leave, she found herself in the Green Lion’s hangar.

She’d spent no small amount of time wandering the castle over the past few days, trying to wrap her head around it. Technology centuries, _millennia_ , beyond anything she’d ever seen, empty rooms to mark the hundreds of people who had lived and died on this ship before her children came here, miles of clean white hallways that lead nowhere.

More than once, she’d found herself at the door of a lion’s hangar, staring in awe (and terror) at the enormous creations. Matt had tried, once, to introduce her to the Red Lion, and though Karen was almost ready to admit that the lions were at least somewhat sentient, she wasn’t sure she’d ever be ready to make the leap from accepting that fact to being as at ease with them as the paladins seemed to be.

Always before, when she’d found herself down here, she’d turned away and put as much distance as possible between herself and the lions. But not today. Today, she needed to understand.

She needed to try.

Setting her bags down by the door—just two bags: a duffle full of clothes and a backpack stuffed with everything else she might need—she started forward, holding onto her elbows.

“So,” she said, tilting her head back to take in the Green Lion. It was one of the smaller lions, but it was still easily forty or fifty feet tall and twice as long from nose to tail. The thick steel claws on its front paws came up to her waist.

Suddenly, Karen felt impossibly small.

The Green Lion didn’t move, but Karen got the impression it was watching her, perhaps wondering why she was here. She cleared her throat, feeling foolish.

“You chose Pidge.” Bitterness rose in the back of her throat. It was a helpless, directionless bitterness, floundering without a target to aim it at. She couldn’t hate Coran for letting the children fight. She couldn’t hate Shiro for leading them. She hated the Galra Empire and those who led it, but what was she supposed to do about that, take up arms and fight them herself? She was no warrior.

Pidge and Matt weren’t warriors, either. They hadn’t been when they left home.

So here she was, angry at a robot for stealing her youngest child away. Angry at the universe for being so cruel.

“I wish I understood why,” Karen said, hands curling toward her chest as she started forward. The hangar was quiet, lonely. A small garden grew in one corner—Ryner’s, surely, because Pidge had never had much of a green thumb. “Why did it have to be _Pidge_?”

A beep at the workstation standing opposite the garden startled Karen and she turned, frowning. The workstation obviously belonged to Pidge; their computer sat atop it, screen dark, cord trailing away to an unidentifiable machine in the corner. Food wrappers, dirty dishes, a single sock, and pages covered in notations and colorful doodles cascaded from the desk and pooled on the floor around the chair.

But it was the computer screen behind the desk that caught Karen’s eye. She hadn’t noticed it when she came in, or maybe it had been switched off. It was on now, casting soft blue light across the room as foreign characters scrolled by.

The text stopped, a cursor flashing, and Karen shook her head. Pidge must have left something running when they went to help with the last of the preparations. Nothing to--

**You wish to understand.**

Karen gave a start, backpedaling as English words abruptly replaced the gibberish that had been there a moment before. The Green Lion creaked (metal settling, nothing more), and Karen glanced hastily around before pulling her sweater close around her shoulders and inching forward.

**You wish to understand, yet you have not asked questions before. Why now?**

“Are… Are you talking to me?”

**Who else?**

Karen almost laughed at that. She glanced behind her. “ _You._ The Green Lion. You’re talking to _me_.”

The screen’s blue light flickered like lights glowing beneath the surface of a pool. **Crudely,** the text read. **But yes. I have questions.**

“ _You_ have questions.” Karen did laugh then, a desperate, anxious sound. “You’re an immortal alien robot!”

**And I do not understand. Why are you here?**

Karen hesitated a moment, feeling foolish. What _was_ she doing here, having a conversation with an immortal, unfeeling being? What did she think would come of this?

But it was talking to her, which was more than she’d dared to hope for. This was an opportunity, and Karen wasn’t about to let it pass. Shaking, she made her way forward and cleared a notepad and a faded blanket off the chair before sitting, back straight as she faced down the Green Lion’s words.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” she admitted. “Trying to make sense of this. Trying to find some peace.”

**Could you not talk to your cubs?**

_Cubs?_ Karen thought, bemused. Did sentient robots reproduce, then? She tried to imagine a robot lion cub the size of a school bus fumbling around the hangar and snorted. “They don’t have the answers I’m looking for. I don’t think anyone does. Except you.”

**Then ask, and I will answer.**

“You chose Pidge. You… Did you not realize how young they were? Are you so ancient that any of us seems like a child?”

For a long moment, Karen’s only answer was the mournful blinking of the cursor. The air felt heavy, the shadows streaking long and dark into the corners of the hangar. The main lights were off, so the only illumination came from the computer screen, the Green Lion’s glowing yellow eyes, and a scattering of lights on the ceiling over the Green Lion’s head.

When the Green Lion answered, it wasn’t with words. It moved, the hiss of its inner workings filling the hangar like a den of vipers. It pitched forward, stretching out its paws until it was laying flush with the floor, its chin hovering only a foot or two off the ground.

The computer beeped, and Karen turned back to the screen to find a reply awaiting her.

**I knew. It seemed irrelevant. Now I see it is not so.**

Tears blurred Karen’s vision. “Irrelevant,” she hissed, the word tasting sour on her tongue. “You carried a fourteen-year-old into battle, and the fact that they were hardly more than a child was _irrelevant_?”

**I care for my paladins, but my first duty is to the universe. Many have died while I waited for a paladin. How could I make them wait longer?**

“So, what? You sacrifice your paladin for the sake of the universe?”

**Not sacrifice. They are my cub. I will keep them safe.**

Karen leaned forward, a silent voice screaming behind her breastbone. “Don’t argue semantics with me. If Pidge dies in this war, it will be because you chose them.” A horrible rending sound split the silence, and Karen turned, eyes widening as she saw that the Green Lion had withdrawn into the shadows beyond the pool of weak overhead lighting, its claws leaving gouges in the floor. Karen’s breath turned shallow, and she stood, advancing on the creature. “It will be. You dragged them into this. You _chose_ them. And you would do it again, wouldn’t you? You said it yourself. Your duty is to the universe. When it comes right down to it, you’re always going to choose the greater good, aren’t you?”

Silence resounded in the space, and Karen stared expectantly at the screen, Green’s last words staring back at her in mockery. _I will keep them safe._

Finally, Green answered.

**Yes.**

Karen turned away, incredulous. It shouldn’t have hit her so hard, but it did. What was one insignificant life to a Voltron Lion? Hardly a blip on the radar. Hardly a passing thought, only useful inasmuch as it allowed Voltron to preserve life on a larger scale. It wasn’t an ignoble intention, and when you aged on the scale of planets and civilizations, a handful of years was nothing. The Green Lion might think it cared for Pidge, might call them its cub, but it was going to watch them die eventually anyway, and then it would choose a new paladin and watch them die, and again, and again into eternity.

“You know,” Karen whispered, “I’m glad Voltron exists. I’m glad there’s something that can stand in Zarkon’s way.” She shook her head, backing toward the door. “But I still hate you.”

She turned toward the door again, ignoring the beep of the computer as the Green Lion displayed a new message. It beeped again, more insistently, as Karen picked up her backpack and slung the duffle over her shoulder.

A rumble, a hiss, and the entire hangar shook. Karen spun, dropping her bags, and braced herself for an attack as the lion charged, lights flashing off its hull.

It stopped short of crushing her, leaning its head down toward her. She flinched away, raising her hands to shield her head, and screwed her eyes shut. But no attack came. Only a distant roll of thunder, a hiss of pistons, and then, gently, a touch of ice against her palms.

“Please.”

The voice was soft, flat, and emotionless. It sounded hollow in the expanse of the hangar, and Karen could make no judgments about its owner, whether age or gender.

“Please,” the voice repeated. “Let me help you.”

There was something subtly off about the cadence of the voice, and the way it emphasized words, and Karen abruptly realized it was a computerized voice. Text-to-speech, reading the Green Lion’s words on the computer.

Cautiously, Karen opened her eyes and looked up at the Green Lion, which watched her with unfathomable eyes large enough to fall into. The tip of its nose brushed against her palms, perfectly still even as she wavered, hands recoiling from the cool metal.

“Help me how?” Karen asked, unable to keep the waver out of her voice.

“Knowledge,” said the computerized voice.

Karen frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“A link. A bond. I can grant you knowledge.”

Karen’s breath turned shallow, and she fell back a single step before stopping herself. “A bond…? Like the paladin bond?” She shied away from the thought, horrified at the thought of walking into battle. But if she could stand in for Pidge? If she could take their place?

“Not that,” said the Green Lion. “A new bond. Adjunct.”

The first thing Karen felt was relief, followed quickly by guilt and shame. “To what end? What would this—this adjunct bond _do_?”

“Peace.” The Green Lion pulled back, lying with its head on its paws just outside Karen’s reach. “You could know things. Know me, know your cub.”

“Telepathy?” Karen asked.

“Perhaps. Someday. It would be more simple at first. You would know that they live. That they are safe. You would know if they need you.”

A lump rose in Karen’s throat, equal parts longing and dread. Her knees already felt weak at the thought of knowing—truly _knowing—_ that Pidge was okay, at all times. And already she knew it would break her to know Pidge was dead, immediately and innately.

Breathing in through her nose, Karen met the Green Lion’s eyes. “And if I accept? What do you expect from me?”

“Trust,” said the Green Lion. “Trust me. Trust your cub. Support us as much as you can.”

Karen hesitated only a moment before nodding. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

The Green Lion rumbled, and the bond settled into Karen’s chest like a physical weight. She was keenly aware of it for a moment, a tightening around her heart and around her lungs. Then the pressure was gone, and the Green Lion retreated to its— _her—_ original position at the center of the hangar.

Karen prodded at the bond, cautiously running her mind outward along its invisible path. Pidge waited at the other end, safe and whole. Karen felt Ryner more distantly, a shadow on the horizon.

One fist closed around the collar of her sweater, and Karen took a moment to bask in the certainty. Now that she’d found Pidge’s presence, it settled in beside her; a candle flame at the back of her mind, burning bright. “Thank you,” she whispered to the Green Lion.

Green purred, and for just an instant, Karen sensed gratitude and sorrow.

Then Green’s presence retreated, and Karen was left alone with her newfound awareness of Pidge chasing doubts and fears from her mind. It never wavered or dimmed, even when her thoughts turned toward other things. Her new home on New Altea. The looming goodbyes. The stacks of literature she needed to read before she could be of any help with negotiations for the Coalition.

In everything, Pidge’s presence remained, comforting and familiar, and Karen let its glow fill her mind as she gathered up her belongings and headed for the entrance hall, where Pidge and Matt would be waiting to say goodbye.


	8. Blue Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Team Voltron returned to New Altea and finalized the treaty. The paladins made appearances around the city, and dozens of people volunteered to join the Voltron Guard or fill other positions on the castle-ship. Karen finally came to terms with her children's role in the war and decided the best thing for her to do would be to step back, to stay on New Altea while the paladins return to the fight. Before she went, though, she confronted the Green Lion and ended up forming a new kind of bond, called an adjunct bond, that lets her sense that Pidge is alive and safe. Meanwhile Thace, fed up with the lies and politics of the Accords on New Altea, approached Keith with a request to be allowed to come along when the castle-ship leaves. Keith is still wary of his uncle, but agreed to let him come along anyway.

“You have everything you need? Shoes? Games? You checked under the couch?”

Ramon laughed and pulled Lance into a hug. “Don’t worry, your mamá already ran through the whole list with us this morning.”

Lance smiled, though it felt fragile. He’d pushed for this because he knew his family would be safer on New Altea than anywhere else, but now that it was time to leave, he didn’t want to let go of his dad. “Sorry. It’s just—we’re not going to be able to come back very often. I don’t want Luz or Mateo to realize tomorrow they forgot something important.”

Mateo huffed, pinching Lance’s hip as he inserted himself into the hug. “What you should be worried about is whether or not I took something of yours,” he muttered sullenly.

Lance pulled back to squint at the top of his head. “ _Did_ you?”

“Maybe.”

Luz laughed as she jumped up and wrapped her arms around Lance’s neck. Her weight nearly dragged him over backwards, and he reached behind him for her legs, hoisting her up so he could draw in a gasping breath.

“I’m gonna miss you, Lance,” she said before he could remind her that she wasn’t a toddler anymore and that people’s necks weren’t monkey bars. She pressed her face against his shoulder and squeezed his neck. “You’re going to call, right?”

“Of course I am,” Lance said, turning to kiss her hair. He let go of her with one hand to pull Mateo against him, blinking back tears. “I’ve gotta have the best audience to tell all about my heroism.”

Lance’s dad was crying now, and Lance averted his gaze before he lost the last of his composure. They were gathered on the airstrip in the shadow of the Castle of Lions, Jana trying to be inconspicuous by the hovercar-like ship that would take the paladins’ families to their house in New Alafor. Val and Sebastian were clinging to each other nearby, Sebastian’s apologies carrying to Lance’s ears as a never-ending mantra. He wasn’t doing well with the situation on the castle ship. Val knew it, Lance knew it, all the adults knew it. Sebastian might have been able to adapt to life in space without the war, but as it was…?

No one had said it outright, but Lance was pretty sure Val had asked her parents to stay with Sebastian on New Altea. They said it was to help with Luz and Mateo, despite Yvis having found them a tutor to help with the homeschooling efforts. There was even talk of enrolling them in a local school. (Luz and Mateo both seemed to hear the part about aliens without processing that it was still school, and Lance figured his dad would do the smart thing and take advantage of their genuine enthusiasm for education while it lasted.)

Beyond Val and her family, Hunk, Pidge, and Matt were saying their own goodbyes. Eli and Karen were staying on New Altea with the Mendozas, while Hunk’s moms were coming with the castle, along with Lance’s mom.

The Holts formed a tight knot, but there were considerably fewer tears there than elsewhere. Lance wondered if it had to do with the way Pidge had suddenly jumped halfway out of their skin a few minutes before Karen showed up. When she had finally arrived, Pidge tackled her in a hug and said, “I know what you did.”

“And…?” Karen had asked.

Pidge had only hugged her tighter, while Matt looked as confused as Lance.

“I’ll be fine,” Val said now as Sebastian finally pulled back, letting their parents take his place. “I’ve still got Lance and Tía Rosa and Meri. And everyone else, too.”

“Just stay safe,” Tía Carmen said. “Promise me you’ll stay safe.”

“We’ll look out for each other,” Lance said, letting Luz slide down his back. She clung to him for a moment, then turned and flung herself at their mom while Lance gave his aunt and uncle and Sebastian lingering hugs. “And, hey, Sebastian. If you want, I can dictate my life story to you. Put me down in epic poetry, what do you think?”

Val swatted the back of his head, smiling through a sheen of tears. “I think you promised _me_ exclusive interview rights, baby cousin. No backsies.”

“Darn.” Lance gave Sebastian an exaggerated shrug. “You heard the lady. Guess I’m booked. But I do have some ideas for a dramatized account. We could even serialize it. _Lance of the Blue Lion: Adventures in Deep Space._ Yeah?”

Sebastian chuckled. “Whatever you say, Lance.”

“Val.”

Val turned, Lance following her gaze to Karen, who stood with Eli, looking drained. Karen hesitated a moment, then surged forward and gave Val a hug.

“Take care of yourself out there,” Karen said. “And tell Akira to do the same. I’ve already hit my quota of heart attacks for the year.”

“And she knows I’m going to give her at least two more before New Year’s,” Pidge added, grinning as Karen bit down on a smile. (That was a change, but not an unwelcome one.)

Val glanced between them, smiling. “I’ll put Akira on a leash, ma’am, no worries.”

Karen snorted and then, as though a signal had been given, those who were staying on New Altea separated from those who were leaving. Rosario pulled Lance and Val against her sides, Matt ruffled Pidge’s hair, and Hunk smiled at his moms, asking if they wanted his help with lunch.

Lance stayed on the tarmac waving until the rest of his family boarded the car-ship and disappeared into the city, then wiped away the last of his tears, smiled at the others, and charged up the ramp into the castle. “We’re having family game night after dinner tonight,” he called over his shoulder. “So make sure you’re done with your crap before then! No exceptions!”

* * *

Two days into the three-day trip to open space, repairs were finally complete. Pidge had managed to lose themself in the work for most of that time, but now that their hands and mind were idle, their mother’s presence rose to the forefront of their mind, as it had each day when they talked. It wasn’t the same bond Pidge shared with Green, where they could sense each other’s thoughts, or even the bond they shared with Ryner, which was weaker outside of Green’s cockpit, mostly limited to a general sense of location and occasional hints of emotion. They knew Karen was alive, and safe, but nothing more.

Oddly, that alone was comforting.

Still, they couldn’t help a sigh of relief when Shiro and Allura called a meeting on the evening of the second day to discuss their strategy going forward.

“We dealt a major blow to Zarkon’s regime when we defeated him at Earth,” Allura said, standing straight-backed at the center of the war room. They’d gathered together what Pidge supposed was the equivalent of the ship’s officers—the paladins, Akira and Layeni, Coran and Zelka, and Thace. Seventeen people in all, far larger than they’d had for any strategy session in the past, and the air was alive with anticipation. “So far, Zarkon has remained quiet, fortunately for us. We haven’t received word of any major strikes since we drove him off. But we cannot count on our luck holding on that front. Sooner or later, Zarkon is going to strike back, and this time he will bring to bear everything he has at his disposal."

Pidge shivered, thinking of the Vkullor egg Zarkon’s soldiers had retrieved from Earth. They tried to remind themself that it would be years before the Vkullor itself was a threat, but there were other possibilities to consider. Haggar might even now be reverse-engineering cloaking technology from the egg, or using it to create even stronger robeasts.

Looking around the room, Pidge saw similar fear reflected back at them. Not everyone knew about the egg; Layeni and Zelka hadn’t been present for that discussion, and Pidge could only guess how much Thace knew about anything.

Shiro stepped forward into the tense silence. “We need to take advantage of this opportunity while it lasts. Kolivan is mobilizing his forces and preparing them for an extended campaign, but it will be a couple weeks before their full fleet joins us. He’s sending an advance force to Earth while the defenses are being set up, so we can call on them if we need backup. Otherwise, our focus right now should be on expanding the Coalition. The more people we can free from Zarkon’s control, the more people willing to fight with us, the better position we’ll be in when Zarkon begins his counterattack.”

“We called you here primarily to gather input,” Allura said. She pressed a button on the edge of the table, and a holographic map appeared in the air overhead. Pidge recognized a few of the markers—Arus, Earth, Vel-17. Allura pressed another button, and over half of the stars turned from blue to red. “There have been thousands of distress calls put out over the last ten thousand years. Even within just the last year...” A large portion of the red lights winked out, but dozens remained, a great many of them clustered around the edges of the empire. Allura shook her head. “There are too many.”

“We’re not going to be able to prioritize our targets using the distress beacons alone,” Shiro said. “There are too many unknowns: how strong is the Imperial presence there? How organized is the resistance? _Is_ there still a resistance? I know most of us here don’t have a lot of experience with the state of the Empire today, but that’s why we’re all going to have to work on this problem together.”

Coran turned to a nook in the wall and pulled out a stack of paper-thin tablets, which he began passing out. “Each of these contains half a dozen planets we’ve identified as a potential priority,” he said, “either because it recently put out a distress beacon, or because Anamuri’s people are aware of an active rebellion there. You’ll also find whatever information Anamuri's intelligence officers were able to send along.” Coran handed the last two tablets to Allura and Shiro, then swiped the screen of his own. “We’ll have to research them manually, rate them for Galra presence, resistance efforts, things like that. Shouldn’t take more than a few hours.”

Allura set her tablet on the table before her and looked around the room. Her gaze lingered on Nyma and on Thace. “If any of you have planets you would like to add to the consideration, or that you think should be a high priority, we welcome your input.”

Across the room, Keith suddenly went tense, his gaze riveted to Thace, who ignored him and calmly began to scroll through the list of planets on his tablet. “I have a few planets I made note of during my service,” he said. “I would be happy to pass along what I know.”

Shiro nodded. “We would appreciate it. Anyone else? Nyma? You know more about the various rebellions than most of us. Anything to add?”

“I’ll have to think about it,” she said shortly. “We were mostly out in deep space. I didn’t get involved in rebellions planetside.”

That made Val frown, but before Pidge could wonder about that, they felt a twinge. For one wild instant, their thoughts went to their mother on New Altea, but it was Ryner. She sat perfectly still, eyes unblinking as she ran one finger down her tablet screen, but inside was pure anticipation strong enough that Pidge could feel it. Curious, they leaned over to see what planets she’d been assigned.

_Olkarion._

It was the fourth planet on the list, but Pidge’s eyes went straight to it, and Ryner’s nervous energy caught fire in Pidge’s veins. No wonder. Pidge had felt much the same when Allura had announced that they were going to Earth: mingled fear and anticipation, joy and horror, and a burning urgency to waste no more time than necessary.

Pidge looked up, studying Ryner’s face. They knew she was aware of their attention, but she didn’t acknowledge it. Her antennae quivered once and went still.

Pidge opened their mouth to recommend Olkarion as a priority—it was the least they could do, after everything Ryner had sacrificed for this team—but Lance spoke first, his hand popping up as he did so.

“Hey, uh, Shiro? Allura?”

“Yes, Lance?” Allura turned to him, smiling.

“Just—I think we should go to Olkarion first.”

A current ran through Ryner’s body and she sat upright, staring intently at Lance, who glanced at her and then at the tabletop before him.

“I mean, look, just from a tactical standpoint, it makes sense. The Empire has a presence on Olkarion, yes, but it’s not actively under siege like what we dealt with on Earth, or on Berlou. Heck, if we can jam their transmissions or something, we can probably stop them from calling for reinforcements, right? And we know there’s an active resistance on the planet we can ally with—Ryner helped lead it! And thanks to her, we know more about the situation there than on any of these planets, with or without research.” He paused, biting his lip. “Plus—it’s Ryner’s home. I know we have to worry about the whole universe and stuff, but there’s no use pretending we don’t have personal attachments to our own homes. Zarkon’s already proven he’s not above using them as leverage. If we don’t help Olkarion now, we risk Zarkon attacking it just to get back at us.”

“A fair point,” Shiro conceded, glancing at Allura. “I’ll admit, we were thinking along the same lines. But we didn’t want to rush into anything without speaking to the rest of you.”

Pidge fidgeted, lifting themself up by pushing on the arms of their chair and crossing their legs beneath them. “You want me to second the motion? Cause I’m definitely on Team Liberate Olkarion. If we’re looking for strong allies, I think they’re a front-runner. Have you _seen_ their tech?” They turned to Ryner. “Right?”

Ryner folded her hands, glancing up only briefly before lowering her eyes once more. “I think I should abstain from this decision. I don’t have to tell you all the draw of home—but Shiro and Allura are right to caution against a hasty decision. We should consider every option before we make a choice.”

“So we go through our lists,” Hunk said, tapping his knuckles against his tablet screen. “We’ve still got a day before we can go anywhere, anyway, right? We meet tomorrow morning, and unless we came across something time-sensitive or whatever, we go to Olkarion.”

“That’s fair,” said Lance, and Shay nodded enthusiastically. The others agreed one by one—all except Keith, Matt, and Thace, who seemed to be having a three-way staring contest across the table at one end.

Shiro frowned, then cleared his throat, and Keith gave a start. He glanced at Shiro, then at Thace, then slumped backward in his seat.

“Is there a problem?” Shiro asked slowly.

“No,” Matt said, his voice dangerous as he stared Thace down. Thace said nothing, but that only darkened Matt’s expression further, and Keith heaved a sigh.

“The Galra homeworld,” he said, staring at the ceiling. Matt rounded on him, anger flashing over to shock.

Matt dropped his voice low, concern pinching his brow. “Keith--”

“There’s no point in ignoring facts,” Keith said. There was a slight drawl to his voice that said he was trying very hard not to look like this conversation mattered, but Pidge knew their brother, and they were coming to know Keith, and the whole exchange stank of hidden meanings.

Allura blinked. “Daibazaal?”

Thace shook his head. “It hasn’t been called that for a long while, your Highness. But yes.”

"Hasn't been called--" Lance shook his head. "Well what's it called now?"

"Nothing," Thace said. "The Galra homeworld is a dead planet, largely ignored even by Zarkon himself. If it comes up in conversation, it's as 'the homeworld,' or occasionally as simply, 'Galra.'"

Shiro frowned, his eyes steady on the side of Keith's head. "And you want to go there?"

“Not as a priority or anything,” Keith said, still not looking at anyone. “Just… down the line. After the Coalition is big enough to pose a real threat to the Empire. If we liberate the Galra homeworld, make it part of the Coalition, it will send a message. Like what we did at Revinor, but on a bigger scale.” He hunched his shoulders. “Since you’re looking for suggestions.”

Matt’s brows were furrowed, his lips pursed. He caught Keith’s eyes and tilted his head to the side. Keith shook his head. His eyes darted to Thace, and Matt’s hackles rose again, but Keith touched his wrist to calm him. They exchanged loaded looks, and Matt finally relented.

“Fine,” he muttered. “If you’re sure.”

Keith pulled one foot up onto his chair and leaned his elbow on top of it. “It’s worth considering,” he said evasively.

A long moment of silence followed, half the room sneaking looks at the red paladins, the others staring openly at Thace, who kept his face blank.

 _What was that about?_ Pidge wondered. They squinted at their brother, trying to tease apart his apparent hostility toward Keith’s uncle, but they drew a blank. Hidden meanings to be sure—but Pidge didn’t have the key to this particular code.

Eventually, Allura gathered her composure and smiled placidly at the room. “Well. If there are no other questions, I’ll leave you all to consider the planets on your lists. There’s a guide on each of your tablets detailing what we’re looking for. We’ve tried to make it as simple as possible, but if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

* * *

The rest of the evening passed in relative silence, the paladins scattered around the castle reading up on planets they’d never even heard of. Lance and Meri claimed a spot in the rec room with Rosario, who volunteered her ear for the both of them to bounce ideas off of. Lance jumped on the offer at once—he’d always thought better when he talked it out--and Meri didn’t waste much time in getting in on the fun.

It was slower than just reading through the information, to be sure, but it was kind of fun to learn about planets he’d never even heard about before. Meri had visited several of them ten thousand years ago, and she chimed in with stories about the people who lived on them, the societies they’d built, their cuisine and music and festivals.

Between the two of them, they came up with two candidates for Allura and Shiro’s short-list, but nothing, in Lance’s opinion, that usurped Olkarion from its prime spot.

None of them had anything that they put at a higher priority than Olkarion, actually, but that didn’t surprise Lance all that much. It _was_ a sound tactical decision, and they all felt a certain protectiveness toward Olkarion. They’d been there once before, and that made it more real somehow. Not just numbers on a page, but real people on a living planet that Zarkon might turn to dust just as soon as he made the connection between Ryner and her people.

“Okay,” Shiro said, scrolling down the short list they’d compiled. Three high priority targets besides Olkarion, a dozen more medium priority. If Voltron liberated even half of these before Zarkon was back to full power, the Coalition would be a formidable army in its own right. “We’re almost to the edge of the defensive zone. Pidge, Ryner.” Shiro caught their eyes, face somber. “As soon as we’re clear, I want the two of you to head to Olkarion for reconnaissance. Go in cloaked, do not engage with the enemy. We’re going to need surprise on our side. Gather whatever information you can. If you can get in touch with your old cell, Ryner, go ahead and do so, but mostly we want to try to pin down troop distributions, fortifications and defenses, communications specs. You should be able to do most of that from the air.”

Pidge nodded. “No heroics. Got it.”

Shiro’s lips twitched. “You know the drill by now. One of us will be on the comms the whole time you’re gone, so call if you run into any trouble.”

“We will,” Ryner said, “and… Thank you.”

Lance leaned forward, stretching his arms across the table toward her. “You don’t need to thank us, Ryner. You helped us protect Earth. We’re happy to repay the favor.”

They left within the hour, and a hush fell over the castle. Luz and Mateo had hardly spent a week on the castle-ship, but Lance was keenly aware of their absence. Wyn and Maka, too, seemed unusually subdued, and Lance thought it might have been because Mateo wasn’t there to round out their trio.

Shiro and Allura had left them all with a warning to be ready for an emergency call at any time, and that left Lance restless, his mind jumping constantly to what might be happening on Olkarion right now. Not that Pidge and Ryner weren’t capable—they were—but the more time Lance spent thinking about strategy, the more he saw all the ways a simple recon mission could fall apart. The fact that your typical Galra commander didn’t show the awareness or initiative to _take_ most of those opportunities meant nothing when the next one they went up against might very well be the one to break the mold.

Lance’s wanderings took him eventually to the Blue Lion’s hangar, where he made himself a nest in the little dip where her paw joined her leg. There was a pneumatic tube in the corner that would deliver his armor if there was an emergency, a fridge rigged up in the corner with snacks and soda—actual soda, straight from Earth, one of the first things Lance had loaded up on when he started packing for space—and a purring robot cat nuzzling at his mind.

“We should hang out more, Blue, you know?” Lance stretched, his back popping as his head tipped backwards over the side of Blue’s paw. “What do giant robots do for fun?”

Blue seemed puzzled, and she presented him with a series of images of himself hanging out with his friends, sewing clothes for refugees, talking to his family on the comms New Altea had provided for the castle. Images of Nyma, Val, and Meri relaxing also slipped into the mix.

“What, you just watch us?”

Blue rumbled something like a laugh, and rifled through his head until she found a memory of Lance playing with his family’s cat with a laser pointer. The cat was now on New Altea, much to the delight of the aliens who had seen her. Little Lion, they called her, and treated her as some bizarre mix of a god and a school mascot. Lance wouldn’t be at all surprised if he returned to find her several pounds heavier.

 _**You want me to do this?** _ Blue asked. _**With the… toy laser? I might cause structural damage.** _

Lance laughed, stuffing his blanket into his mouth to muffle the sound. “Might cause a little bit of panic, yeah. But… don’t you ever get bored?”

_**Bored?** _

“Yeah. Like… you have nothing to do, so you just stare at the wall and wish someone else was around to hang out with. Or, whatever it is you do when I’m not around, besides spying on me.”

 _**We do not get bored.** _ The words were accompanied by an image of Blue sitting in a cave, maybe the same one where Lance had found her several months ago. As he watched, she powered down, and the vision skipped ahead to when her eyes lit up once more. Lance got the sense a considerable amount of time had passed in the interim.

“Huh. Well, I guess that’s one way to deal with it.”

Blue rumbled, her presence withdrawing from Lance’s mind. There was a flash of agitation as it went, and Lance sat up straight, legs crossed, hands gripping his ankles.

“You okay, beautiful?”

Blue reached out mentally in what Lance thought was supposed to be a reassuring touch. It fell flat, and Lance caught a glimpse of Meri through the bond. She sat at a computer console, the blue light of the Altean screens giving her a slightly washed-out look. She seemed… sad?

“Something wrong with Meri?”

 _**Private,** _ Blue said. _**I should not say.** _

Lance pursed his lips. Things had been weird with his fellow Blues since the battle for Earth. Lance and Val had synced up, sure, and that was going great. Val’s station had some extra scanners that even Green didn’t get, and Lance swore he could sense the other lions a little bit, when he really focused. He couldn’t stop wondering how much more they could do when all four of them were together.

Unfortunately, it was rare to _have_ all four of them together. Nyma spent a considerable amount of time with Val, so Lance could occasionally make an effort at friendship there, but Nyma and Meri seemed determined never to be in the same room. Lance didn’t get why. It wasn’t like either of them had done something to offend the other. He didn’t think they had, anyway; they didn’t spend enough time together for that.

They were all withdrawn—Nyma mourning Rolo and trying not to show it, Val’s mind sometimes getting lost in her memories of Project Balmera, Meri… Lance didn’t actually know what it was that made Meri go so quiet sometimes, her eyes staring at something Lance couldn’t see. The scars of a planet long since dead, he supposed. She’d been through hell long before Lance knew her.

The problem was none of them talked about it, which meant that they didn’t deal with it, which meant things festered. And now it was making Blue upset.

“You’re right, Blue,” he said, though Blue in fact hadn’t said anything. He knew what she meant. “It’s time for an intervention.”

* * *

Edi glanced over her shoulder. She shouldn’t be here; she _knew_ she shouldn’t be here. She blamed Maka for turning her into a trouble-maker, because she certainly wasn’t like this on her own. She was second-oldest of the kits who had been on Revinor, and easily the most mature of the lot, and she didn’t go sneaking around like some kind of miscreant.

Except today.

Steeling herself with a deep breath, Edi turned back to the door ahead of her. She’d come this far half a dozen times before, but she’d always backed out before taking the final plunge.

She should have done this when they were still on New Altea, and Shiro and the princess were too busy with political stuff to catch her. Except that while they’d been on New Altea, there had been a constant stream of important visitors coming for a tour of the Castle of Lions, and Edi, along with most of the other kits, had been shuffled quietly out of the way.

Edi curled her hands into fists a few times, then reached up and smacked the door controls before she had time for second thoughts. The control pad glowed briefly blue, and at the same moment the door slid aside, spilling cool air out into the corridor. The room beyond was dark, but Edi plunged in, squeaking as the door slid shut behind her. It took her eyes a few moments to adjust to the low lighting—just the emergency strips around the floor and a few spots of blue and red where computers idled in the shadows.

Edi took a cautious step forward, and was answered by a deafening roar as light flooded the hangar. She screamed; every bone in her body told her to run for her life before she was gobbled up by a Vkullor in the night, but she was frozen. It was like some alien thing had taken control of her body, locking her in place as a predator bore down on her.

The blinding lights dimmed to a more comfortable level, and Edi opened her eyes to the sight of the Black Lion leaning over her, eyes glowing golden. It had surprised her, when she first saw the Voltron Lions, that they had the eyes of Galra. She’d heard only scattered rumors of Voltron growing up, but all had painted the Lions as enemies of the Galra people.

She was beginning to see that that wasn’t true at all. Keith was a Galra, and he was a paladin, and none of the lions seemed to have a problem with that. And it was twice now that Voltron had come to rescue Galra, first on Revinor and then at the New Altean ship, the _Swiftling._

It was things like this that made Edi think that maybe she wasn’t crazy to dream of piloting one of the lions someday. Maka thought she was. He said she was just a nobody tattletale and she’d never be a paladin.

“He’s wrong,” Edi said, as much to herself as anyone. Staring up at those massive, luminous eyes, though… She wondered whether the Black Lion was listening, too.

Shaking horribly, Edi lifted a hand toward the Black Lion’s snout. She expected her to pull away. (If she was honest, she expected Black to bite her hand off, but that was only the irrational part of her mind that didn’t care that the lions had no teeth.)

Her fingers brushed the lion’s chin, and a faint rumble raised the fur along her arms, rattling something deep inside her.

The door behind Edi hissed open, and she snatched her hand back, guilt curdling in her stomach as she caught sight of Princess Allura.

“Edi?” Allura asked, stopping just inside the hangar. “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing,” Edi said, her traitorous ears quivering atop her head. “Looking for you. I… wanted to ask if we could train today?”

Allura shifted her weight, crossing her arms over her chest. Her lips quirked into a smile. “I suppose I could spare an hour or so,” she said. “Are you going to train in that?”

Edi looked down at herself, suddenly remembering that she was dressed in the short skirt and fitted shirt Lance had made for her—not exactly clothes for exercising. “Uh—no? No. I’m going to go change. I’ll meet you on the training deck?”

Allura nodded, and Edi took off at a sprint, her ears burning as she felt two sets of eyes watching her hasty exit. She ran all the way to her room and changed into the Altean jumpsuit she wore for training as quickly as she could manage. She was done and careening around the corner to the room she and the Princess usually used for practice in five minutes flat—but there were two figures huddled outside when she arrived, and she had to catch herself on the door frame of the neighboring room to keep from slamming into them.

“What are _you_ doing here?” Edi demanded, glowering at Maka as he looked her up and down.

He rolled his eyes. “I should have known she was here for _you_. Do you do _anything_ but train?”

Edi’s ear twitched once, and she scrunched up her nose. “Just because I don’t go around getting into trouble like you—and dragging poor Wyn into it, too!”

“Hey!” Maka cried. “Wyn drags me into stuff all the time. Don’t you?”

Wyn had kept himself a few steps behind Maka since Edi arrived, clearly trying not to get involved, and he held up his hands now, smiling innocently. (Edi wished she still bought his innocent act.) “Me? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Maka elbowed him in the side, and Wyn doubled over, giggling. “Liar,” Maka accused, but he was grinning too, and Edi had to back up as their roughhousing slid rapidly toward outright wrestling.

The door opened before it came to that, and Allura arched her eyebrow at the two boys, who snapped upright, tucking their hands behind their backs.

“Um, hello, Princess Allura,” Maka said, ducking his head.

“Hi, Allura,” Wyn echoed, considerably more at ease than Maka.

“Hello.” Allura twirled her staff once, then let one end drop to the ground beside her. She leaned on it, her eyes sweeping down to their feet, then back up to their faces. “Have you decided to join us for training today?”

“What?” Maka asked, shock snapping him out of his forced politeness. “Ew, no way!”

Allura stifled a laugh. “No?”

“No! We were just… on our way to the pool. And got a little lost.” Maka turned on his heel and all but ran for the elevator. “Come on, Wyn!”

Wyn hesitated. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, and for a second Edi thought he might actually ask to join Edi’s training group.

“Wyn!” Maka hollered from the end of the hallway.

Wyn jumped and spun around. “Coming!” he called. He glanced back once, then took off after Maka, and Edi breathed a small sigh of relief. She looked up at Allura, who watched Wyn go with an odd expression.

“Princess Allura?”

Allura shook herself, then smiled down at Edi. “Right,” she said. “Let’s do your stretches, then, and we can get right to it.”

* * *

It took some time to track down the other blue paladins, but Lance managed. Val and Nyma were sprawled across the couch in the rec room, Val atop Nyma and providing commentary on _Beauty and the Beast_ , which they had playing on the hybrid DVD/holo-vid setup (one of Pidge’s insomnia projects, no doubt.)

Lance hesitated in the door, momentarily reconsidering his plan. They were having a good time here. He couldn’t pull them away from that, could he?

Then Val caught sight of him and waved, and Lance spotted the false cheer in her smile. She had to elbow Nyma in the ribs before she realized they had a guest—and Lance doubted that was because she found Disney movies riveting.

Blue purred reassurance in the back of Lance’s mind, and he straightened up. “Hey, you guys aren’t busy, are you?”

“Just watching… this...” Nyma waved vaguely at the screen, and Val sighed.

“Need something?”

Lance smiled. “It’s a surprise. Come on. We still have to find Meri.”

Val and Nyma followed, confusion coloring the silence that floated around them. Nyma tried twice to ask what Lance was up to, but Val caught on quick enough and told Nyma not to waste her breath.

“He gets like this.”

Meri was on the comms deck near the top of Blue Tower, the room dark except for the blue glow of the computer screen. She had wrapped herself up in a blanket, her feet propped up on the table. “I don’t know, what do you think? Am I completely crazy?”

“Actually--”

Meri caught sight of Lance and the others and thrashed free of her blanket, feet hitting the floor. She lunged toward the comms control with a hasty, “Gotta go,” and switched the screen off. The room’s lights came up automatically, leaving Meri squinting, her face carefully expressionless.

Lance cocked his head to one side. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“It’s fine.” Meri’s voice was thin and an octave too high, but she smiled and spun her chair around, grabbing a package of Oreos off the desk and offering them to Lance. “Hungry?”

Lance grabbed a cookie and popped it in his mouth, still studying Meri. “Who were you talking to?”

“One of the rebels.” Meri shrugged, the motion perfectly easy—easy enough that Lance couldn’t help being suspicious. He’d known her for years and never seen through her act, and sometimes… Sometimes it felt like she still didn’t let him see the real Meri. “Just—trying to find out what happened to some of the worlds I knew back before… _before._ ” Her smile wavered, and that much had to be genuine emotion. “Don’t worry about it.”

Lance’s heart sank, but Meri’s words only fueled his resolve. They were all dealing with issues, it was true. That didn’t mean they had to deal with them alone.

Grinning, he pulled out a jar of eye cream—just one of dozens of self-care products he’d stockpiled, some taken from Earth, some scrounged from the castle-ship and various trade moons. “I was thinking,” he said slowly, turning the jar between his hands. “It’s been a rough couple of weeks, and we can’t really get into anything major in case Pidge and Ryner call, but… Spa day?”

Meri blinked twice, then laughed in delight, while Val bit her lip and tried to gauge Nyma’s reaction.

Nyma only crossed her arms. “You’d better not have the shitty stuff.”

“Please.” Lance closed his hand around the eye cream and pressed his fist to his chest. “I actually _care_ about my skin, unlike half the castle. I don’t go in for the cheap crap.”

“All right then. Let’s have a spa day. Why the hell not?”

Val squealed, grabbing Nyma’s arm and towing her toward the door. “Your room?” she asked Lance. “Or does this place have an actual spa?”

“You’ll see,” Lance said in a sing-song, taking the lead. He headed for the elevator, catching Meri’s eye as he pressed the button for the top floor. She was grinning, practically bouncing on her toes, and her eyes locked on the button Lance pressed. Oh, yeah. She knew about this place.

At the top of the Blue Lion’s tower was what Lance could only describe as a self-contained hot spring, complete with faux stone outcroppings and plush towels. Steam softened the air, and in places along the far side of the massive room, he could see what looked like snow spotting the fake stones. The air had a chill to it that the warm water couldn't totally chase away, and the babbling of a few small waterfalls made Lance shiver in anticipation.

The changing rooms were stocked with a variety of wraps and bathing suits, along with some of the softest bath robes Lance had ever had the good fortune to encounter. He was aware, in a general sense, that having a soak wasn’t exactly staying on high alert—but at the same time, wearing fewer clothes only meant less fabric to wrestle with if he had to suddenly put on his armor. Besides, the elevator went straight down to Blue’s hangar, so even with having to dry off, they’d still probably beat half the others to the lions.

Plus, Lance just really wanted to relax with his copaladins.

The others certainly weren’t complaining. They were all changed before Lance, Val and Meri taking running leaps into one of the deeper pools and splashing water up over the edges. Nyma followed more sedately. Lance tossed some towels over a relatively dry rock, set down a makeup bag full of lotions, creams, nail polish, and face masks atop the towels, and finally let himself test the water.

It was as warm as he’d hoped, silky smooth and smelling faintly of salt. Lance sighed and lowered himself into the water so it lapped at his chin, working the aches out of his muscles.

“Good call on the spa day,” Val said, floating on her back, her hair fanned out around her. “God, this place is amazing.”

“Isn’t it, though?” Meri had settled back on a reclining seat disguised as part of the rocky walls, her eyes fluttering closed. “I used to come up here all the time with Allura.”

Her voice faltered at the end, her shoulders hitching upward, and Lance watched for evidence of grief to spill across her face. Who else had she come here with? Lealle? Keturah? Alfor? Lance knew so little about the previous paladins.

Meri’s face remained neutral, however, just the barest hint of a frown tugging at her lips. Lance resisted the urge to press her on it. Some things were too private to be dragged out before their time, and Lance had a sneaking suspicion that addressing any of the elephants in the room was going to require tact. More ‘whittling knife,’ less ‘jackhammer.’

So Lance shut off his brain for now and let Val tease him into a water fight that lasted only until Meri got into the facial supplies and they all congregated on the edge of the spring, their feet dangling in the water, their pores celebrating the kind of TLC that was getting progressively rarer with each passing day. Even Nyma joined in on the fun, despite her reservations about Earth cosmetics.

By the time they moved on to manicures, none of them were thinking about emergency calls. They’d found the snack bar functionality and had some fruit and sweets to munch on, along with glasses of nunvill—something Lance was mostly sure was alcoholic, but only a little, and none of the others seemed to care anyway. It took the edge off Lance's nerves and so when, an hour into the spa day, Lance’s eyes fell on the scar at Val’s collarbone where the scientists of Project Balmera had implanted a seed crystal, he didn’t have the presence of mind to keep his mouth shut.

“How are you doing?” he asked, claiming a seat next to Val. Meri was massaging Nyma’s headtails, something that, apparently, very few people knew how to do without making it weird. The fact that Meri was a master of the skill overrode whatever awkwardness there still was between them, and Nyma had melted under Meri’s ministrations.

Val, in contrast, tensed, her eyes darting Lance’s way. “What do you mean?”

This time, Lance stopped himself from blurting out his very first thought, which was something along the lines of, _The crystals taking over your body—do they still suck, or…?_ He took a moment instead to sip his nunvill, shuddering at the taste. “It means however much you want it to mean,” he said, not looking at Val, “and not a bit more.”

Val snorted, turning sideways on their perch to drape her legs across Lance’s lap. They were in a shallow section of the springs, but the water still buoyed Val’s legs so they barely ghosted over Lance’s. She studied him for a long moment before sighing. “Lance, I _can’t_.”

“That’s fine.” Lance held up his hands, flashing an easy smile. Meri and Nyma were trying too hard not to watch the exchange, and Lance was keenly aware of their attention. “Totally okay. The point of today is to relax. That means zero pressure to talk about anything you don’t want to, honest to Voltron.”

Rolling her eyes, Val flicked a grape-like fruit at Lance. It bounced off his nose and hit the water with a small _plop_ , bobbing atop the waves. “You’re such a dork.”

Lance spread his hands, smiling unabashedly, and was rewarded with a soft laugh.

“Blue put you up to this?”

Lance turned toward Meri, who was still wholly focused on Nyma, her smile easy. Sensing the attention suddenly turned her way, she looked up.

“What? I know she’s worried about me. I wouldn’t put it past her to suggest all this just so you could tell me to _talk it out._ ”

Frowning, Lance set his nunvill aside. “Okay, first of all, she’s worried about _all_ of us. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve had a tough run of it lately.”

Nyma scoffed. “Oh, give me a break, Lance.” She sat up, shrugging off Meri’s hands, and leaned her elbows on her knees, hands cradling her chin. “Don’t pretend like you’re not the favorite child here.”

“What?”

Nyma gestured broadly with one hand, her sparkly magenta nail polish catching the imitation sunlight. “We’re all gigantic messes, _sure_. Don’t deny it,” she added, staring at her hand so Lance couldn’t tell if she meant the words for Val or for Meri. “We are, and we all know it. But that’s _us_. You’re the one who actually has his shit together, Lance. Don’t pretend like you’re as bad as us. It’s patronizing.”

Lance was too shocked to answer for a long moment. _He_ was the one who had it together? That almost got a laugh out of him, but he thought that might have been rude. So he just stared at Nyma, trying to scrounge together a coherent response.

“I’m not, though.”

“Not what?” Nyma asked. She slipped back into the water, pushing off the wall and drifting out into one of the deeper pools. A fine mist hung over the water, reminding Lance of the sea with a storm on the horizon.

Lance followed after her, treading water. The air over this way was chillier, the rocks around several nearby pools covered in a thin layer of snow. It made Lance’s exposed skin prickle, and he sank lower in the water. “I’m not just _pretending_ to be messed up.”

“Coulda fooled me.”

“Yeah, well, consider yourself lucky you missed the worst of it.”

Silence greeted this statement, and Lance instinctively ducked down in the water, crossing his arms over his chest. Shame rose in his throat as he remembered old insecurities, mostly gone now—buried, at least. There had been a time when everyone else had found their copaladins, and it had left Lance feeling left out, like a grade schooler who’d been picked last for dodgeball. It had seemed petty at the time, and distance only made it more so.

But Val and Meri were watching him now, and Lance realized that, maybe, Blue _had_ been worried for him, too. Maybe she’d pushed for this for his sake as much as anyone else’s.

Maybe he shouldn’t be telling the others to open up if he wasn’t going to do the same.

“It’s just… everyone on this castle is pretty amazing, right? Pidge and Ryner and Hunk can build literally anything you want, Keith’s, like, the best pilot I’ve ever seen, Shay’s got a healing touch, Shiro and Allura are just all-around amazing, and Matt’s literally a wizard.” Lance glanced at the others, who had gathered around as he talked. Feeling suddenly claustrophobic, he kicked to the edge of the pool and pulled himself up onto the rocks, ignoring the frigid air that made his teeth chatter. “Looking at all of them, it’s hard to understand why Blue ever picked me to be her paladin—and then when everyone else had found their partners and whatever, I guess it just made everything worse. I wasn’t just the weakest paladin, but I was the only one in the cockpit, so we were the weakest link in Voltron, too.”

Meri’s careful composure slipped away at that. She was practically glowering as she came over to where Lance sat, grabbing onto his ankles under the water. “You don’t still feel like that, do you?”

Lance shrugged. “Not as much, I guess.”

“Of course not,” Nyma said, her voice just this side of grating. “He’s got us to compare himself to. That’s gotta do wonders for his self-esteem.”

“Not...really?” Lance shivered, rubbing his hands up and down his arms. “I mean, yeah, Blue and I are tight, but you’ll get there in a couple weeks, too. And _look_ at you! Nyma, you’ve been holding your own against the Empire for years. Once you and Blue develop your bond, you’re gonna be a killer paladin. And Meri—you actually _trained_ for this! The rest of us are fumbling along, so you’ve already got a leg up on all of us, even without counting all that time you spent sneaking around spying on the Garrison.” He turned to Val. “And you’re so smart and resourceful? Even when you were a prisoner, you still managed to figure out what was happening and escape to bring us that information. You and Nyma are the entire reason we were able to save Earth. You guys are all amazing, and I’m just… me.”

Meri arched an eyebrow at him. “You’re right. You’re _you—_ the kid who couldn’t possibly know that I’d just lost my entire people but still managed to help me rebuild my life. The guy who made Blue fall head over heels for him. The first person I’ve ever known to beat Coran at eshet, by the way, and don’t you dare tell me strategy isn’t a valuable skill for a paladin.”

Lance flushed. “Yeah—okay. Like I said, it’s better now, and the point of this isn’t to throw a pity party for me. I just...” He faltered, a shiver taking up in his chest that he didn’t think was entirely to do with the cold. “I get it if you guys have things you aren’t ready to talk about, but if you ever _do_ want to talk, or just want to forget about the ugly side of life for a while… I’m always here. That’s all I wanted to say.”

Val bit her lip, then swam closer, taking Meri’s place in front of Lance. “Look. Lance. I’m—I’m still dealing with everything that happened in Project Balmera. I won’t insult you by pretending I’m over it. I don’t know when I’ll be ready to talk about it, _if_ I’ll ever be ready, but… You're right. I've got you, _all_ of you, and that helps more than you could possibly know.”

“Seconded,” said Meri. “The skeletons in my closet are mine to deal with, but… Spa days and affirmations might be a good tradition to establish. Counteract all the noise in our heads, yeah?”

Lance smiled, his embarrassment fading somewhat. “Sure. Nyma?”

Nyma flipped a hand, not moving from her place along the opposite wall. “Hey, if it means facials and massages, I’m down for just about anything.”

“Sounds like a unanimous vote to me,” Lance said. He slid off the rocks, a smile on his face, but when he hit the water, the room plunged into total darkness.

* * *

Keith grunted as he caught the gladiator’s attack. He was wielding a sword from the castle’s armory, and the unfamiliar weight kept throwing him off. It was well balanced, but heavier than what he was used to. Alteans didn’t typically use energy weapons, it seemed, whereas it was a rule in the Empire not to use more metal than strictly necessary.

Pivoting, Keith kicked the gladiator away, then gave chase, throwing his full weight behind the next attack. He had the training program on level two—significantly lower than his usual workouts. Matt had insisted, though, and given how this fight had gone (and the way the half dozen fights before it had gone), Keith was beginning to see the sense in Matt’s suggestion.

The gladiator made one last attempt at defense, but Keith batted the attack away with his shield and buried his sword in the robot’s chest. Its eye flickered and went out, and Keith backed away, letting the castle reclaim the gladiator for repairs.

“So?” Matt asked. He sat balanced atop the weapons rack, his attention split between watching Keith’s fights and picking swords out of the rack one by one to examine them.

“Better than the last one,” Keith said, swinging the sword a few more times. “It’s still heavier than I’m used to, but I could probably get used to it.”

Matt laid his current sword, a rapier, across his lap and looked up at Keith. “But…?”

With a sigh, Keith hooked an arm around the vertical support at one end of the weapons rack and sagged away from it. “I don’t know, Matt. It’s not a _bad_ sword. It’s just… not _right._ ”

Thankfully, Matt didn’t ask for more details. Even if he had, Keith wasn’t sure he would have been able to supply them. He had trouble pinpointing his issues with the castle’s swords, even to himself. They didn’t fit his hand, or they fought him when he attacked, or they didn’t cut as smoothly as an energy blade, got stuck in the gladiator’s armor, screeched with each attack.

Or maybe none of that was the real issue. Maybe it was the sword still waiting for him in his bedroom. Maybe he should stop fighting his mother’s designs and accept that that was where his life was headed: straight back into the heart of the Galra Empire to trade his soul for the freedom of the universe.

“Forget these swords,” Matt said, sliding the rapier back into its spot. He hopped down and held out a hand for Keith’s sword, then put it away with the rest. Tapping the controls sent the whole rack back up into the ceiling. “Why don’t you try the bayard?”

Keith frowned. “Wouldn’t that leave you without a weapon, then?”

“Call it an experiment,” Matt said with a shrug. “Besides, we’ve needed people in the air a lot lately. I don’t need the bayard if I’m in Red.”

“Unless you guys form Voltron and need its sword.”

“True.” Matt pointed at him, looking thoughtful. “Then again, Shay pulled the bayard away from Hunk when we needed it a couple weeks ago. We could do that.”

Keith shook his head, already picturing the sword getting ripped out of his hand in the middle of battle. “Better an imperfect weapon than none at all. Let’s just keep trying them, okay? Something in here has to work.”

“ _Or._ ”

Matt grinned, summoning the bayard. It appeared in his hand as a pistol—the first time in a long time it had done so. Matt frowned, and the bayard changed shape to the usual sword. When Keith had first met Matt, his bayard had taken on a form almost indistinguishable from the swords used in Arena matches, complete with atypical grip and vicious hook. It had changed over the intervening weeks, gradually softening into something more fitting to Matt’s temperament. There was still a slight hook on the tip, which Matt used to great effect to rip off sections of enemies’ armor or to disarm them, but the grip was now a more traditional hilt, and the entire thing had shrunk by nearly a foot.

He held the sword parallel to the floor, the flat of the blade facing Keith. “Summon it,” Matt said. “I want to see something.”

Keith searched for a reason to deny Matt’s order, but he came up blank. He’d never wielded a bayard before; he’d always had his sword and his mother’s dagger, both more familiar to him than a weapon made by long-dead aliens. It was said the bayard took on the form best suited to its paladin, at least until they learned the control needed to summon it in different forms. Matt, Hunk, and Lance had all mastered that talent. Keith had to admit he was curious.

Keith held up his hand, reaching into his suit’s psychic controls for the place the bayard was stored. He had a vague idea how to summon it thanks to sharing a mind with Matt, but it still took him several long seconds to replicate it for himself. When he did, he felt a tug, like something was holding the bayard back.

“Huh,” Matt said, and opened his hand. The bayard vanished in a flash of light, reappearing in Keith’s hand in its inactive form. Matt crossed his arms. “Aren’t you going to activate it?”

“I don’t--”

“Begin training level six,” Matt said flatly. Heart pounding, Keith spun toward the ring of metal feet touching the floor, raising his sword just in time to parry the gladiator’s first attack.

It didn’t let him linger in the parry but reversed, swinging for his legs. Keith leaped over the attack, swinging downward at the same moment. His blade sliced cleanly through the gladiator’s arm, and the severed hand clattered to the ground, twitching once before it went still.

“End training sequence,” Matt called.

Keith landed, taking several steps to keep his balance. He turned, scowling at Matt. “You don’t have to sound so smug about it.”

Matt only smiled and nodded toward the sword in Keith’s hand. “Pretty snazzy, isn’t it?”

Now that he wasn’t fighting to keep his hide intact, Keith had time to study the sword—a simple sword, the blade straight and double-edged, unlike the sword he’d used before or the one his mother had given him. The blade was done all in the same white metal that made up all the bayards, red accents chasing the length of the blade. It was lighter than a sword that size should have been, and sharp, too. Keith’s eyes went to the severed hand lying near his foot. He couldn’t have expected a cleaner cut from an energy blade.

“It’s a good sword,” Keith said grudgingly. In truth, it was more than merely _good_ , but Matt didn’t need any more incentive to try to give up his bayard to Keith.

Something tugged at the bayard, as though an invisible hand had reached out to pluck it from Keith’s grasp. He frowned first at the sword, and then at Matt.

“You felt it?” Matt said. “We can’t just steal it away from each other. Maybe if we were desperate, I don’t know. But it’s more like… tapping you on the shoulder and asking if I can cut in.”

“I guess. Why does that matter?”

Matt glanced at the frozen gladiator, a familiar smile creeping across his face. That smile spoke of danger and of recklessness, and Keith couldn’t stop his ears from lifting to the implied challenge.

“Keith,” Matt said slyly. “I have an idea. It’s a little weird, but just hear me out for a second. What if we shared the bayard?”

“…Okay?”

“No, no, no.” Matt held up his hands. “You don’t get it. What if we _shared_ the bayard. In battle. You train in sword-and-dagger forms, I figure out how to incorporate magic into my fighting style, maybe carry a spare laser pistol until then. And we _both_ wield the bayard, sending it wherever it’ll do the most good.”

Keith turned the bayard over in his hand. It was an intriguing possibility. “We’d have to be perfectly in sync. One mistake and we’d leave the other person practically defenseless.”

“But if we can make it work?” Matt asked. “It would be like having an extra bayard out on the field. It’s the best weapon we have, and the most versatile.”

A smile broke past Keith’s skepticism as he pictured the two of them tag-teaming an enemy, bayard flickering between them almost faster than thought. “If nothing else, it’s good training, I guess.”

“ _Right?_ ” Matt was grinning now, his energy infectious, and Keith fell into stance, bayard and dagger in hand as Matt claimed a pistol from the castle stores, then started the gladiator on level four. Keith’s heart beat faster in anticipation, his fingers curling around the bayard as he waited for Matt to tug at it.

This was going to be ugly, Keith was sure of it.

It was also going to be really vrekking fun.

* * *

The first thing Lance saw was stars.

They spread out above him, twinkling in unfamiliar constellations. Or… no, some of those constellations were right. That was the Little Dipper, and over there was Draco—only it was in the wrong part of the sky, too near the horizon considering how high the North Star was.

Frowning, Lance tried to sit up, only to realize he was floating in water. His head dipped below the surface for a moment, water surging into his nose. He came up coughing, but the burn he usually felt when he got water up his nose was completely absent. It was almost as though the water didn’t exist.

Except, of course, for the fact that he was completely surrounded by it, treading water in the middle of a seemingly endless ocean. The only light to be seen came from the stars—the stars and a faint glow at the horizon. He thought at first it was the glow of city lights, but he turned a little and it was the last streak of sunset, and then bioluminescent algae floating on the waves.

“Uh… hello?” Lance called. “Anyone there? Val? Meri? Nyma? This is officially the weirdest fake hot springs I’ve ever been to.”

Something brushed against his leg under the water, and for a moment, Lance panicked, swimming as fast as he could away from the… whatever it was. He couldn’t tell if he was making any progress; there were no landmarks out here, no change in the stars overhead or the lights on the horizon. The waves rose and fell around him, but for all he knew he might have been swimming against a current, never moving from the place he’d woken up.

_**Be calm.** _

The voice seeped up from the depths of the ocean, curling around Lance’s body like eddies and sinking into his skin even before the words reached his ears.

At once, Lance stilled, turning slow circles in the water. “Blue? Blue, is that you? Where are you?”

_**Below.** _

Below…? Lance looked down at the surface of the ocean. It was a deep, inky black broken only by the occasional glimmer of starlight on the peak of a wave. Lance quested downward with his feet, but if there was solid ground beneath him somewhere, it was out of his reach.

“Can you, uh, come up? Maybe?”

Blue rumbled, the sound confused. _**I am below,** _ she said. _**Come to me.** _

Lance could think of several good reasons not to dive down into the unknown, especially at night, especially when he didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten here. But it was Blue, and he would follow Blue damn near anywhere.

And so, drawing in a deep breath, Lance dove beneath the waves, kicking himself deeper and deeper. He reached out along the bond he shared with Blue, trying to find her in the darkness, but he couldn’t sense her. Or he could, but he sensed her all around.

 _**Deeper,** _ Blue said. _**We are deeper.** _

_We?_ Lance wondered.

His lungs were burning now, but he swam onward, expecting to find sand at any moment. He found nothing.

The need for air soon became unbearable, but in the instant before Lance turned back toward the surface, two golden lights appeared somewhere below him, glowing like a pair of angler fish. They were small but bright, almost impossibly so, and they seemed to call to Lance, enticing him closer.

They grew larger as they approached, moving in perfect tandem like--

_Blue?_

The word escaped in a rush of bubbles, and panic took hold of Lance. He shot one last look at the twin glows—the eyes of a Voltron Lion, he was sure of it—before he turned and headed for the surface.

* * *

Lance broke the surface, gasping for air as the bright lights of the hot springs room stung his eyes. “What the--?” He flailed, catching himself on a rock beside the spring, and clung onto it as he shook the water from his eyes. His lungs were burning, his legs aching like he’d just swum the English Channel. “What was _that_?”

Val rose to the surface nearby, her eyes wild and unfocused, an aborted scream on her lips. Lance reached out to catch her, pulling her to the edge of the pool. She clung to him, laughing incredulously.

“What the hell?” she whispered. “Is there LSD in these springs?”

“You saw it too, then?” Lance asked. “The ocean?”

Val frowned at him, then turned suddenly, nearly slipping beneath the surface. “Nyma,” she gasped.

Fresh adrenaline flooded Lance’s system, and he turned, scanning the spring for the other two paladins. Nyma was where she’d been when Lance disappeared to the strange ocean, one hand pressed to her forehead. Val kicked off the wall and shot toward her, calling out her name.

“Fine,” Nyma whispered before Val could get a question out. “I’m fine.”

Lance turned away from them as Val crashed into Nyma, latching onto her like an octopus with abandonment issues. He didn’t see Meri anywhere. Was she--?

She appeared a few feet away, quite suddenly. For a moment she sat high in the water, as though she was standing on a shallow ledge, but she dropped down a moment later, floating at the same height as Lance. He swam toward her, reaching out to check if she was alright.

Meri jumped as Lance touched her arm, turned toward him, and grinned. “Did you see that—Val, Nyma! Did you _see_ that?! Quiznak! I think that was the Heart!”

“The what?” Lance asked.

“The Heart of the Lions—or close to it, anyway.” Meri shook her head, laughing in delight. “I think we just visited the astral plane. I’ve never—I’ve only ever heard stories about the Hearts. It takes some people _years_ to find their way there!” She laughed again and ran a shaking hand through her hair. Seeming to remember Lance, she turned and grabbed him by the shoulders. “You were there, right? You saw it?”

“The ocean?” Lance asked. “Yeah. Yeah, I was there. I didn’t see you, though.”

Meri shook her head. “No. You wouldn’t have. I think we were only just at the very edge. Lealle always said it was like a dream at the edges. Not very stable. We’d probably have to go deeper to find each other.

_We are deeper._

The Blue Lion’s voice echoed in Lance’s ears, and he shivered despite the warmth of the spring water. “Do you think this might help us sync up?”

Meri stared at him for a long moment, dumbstruck, then whooped and headed for the edge of the pool. “Nyma! Val! Get dressed! We’re going to see Blue!”

“ _What?_ ” Nyma cried. “Why the hell would you want to do that?”

“We just deepened our bond with Blue,” Meri said, slipping on the rocks around the pool as she sprinted for the pile of towels they’d left by the first pool. “We’re going to try to sync up.”

Val gasped, her hands flying to her mouth. “Wait— _really?_ ” She screamed, hauling herself up out of the water. She turned around as soon as she was on solid ground and reached back to help Nyma up.

Nyma pulled back. “You guys go,” she said, pursing her lips. “I think I’ll pass.”

“Pass?” Val laughed. “Good one, Nyma. Come on. Let’s--”

“I’m not joking, Val.” Nyma’s voice was sharp, stopping Lance halfway to the towels. He turned, frowning as Val slowly drew back her hand, looking hurt.

“What are you talking about?” Val asked. “We’re going to sync up. Don’t you want to...? Don’t you at least want to _try_?”

Nyma cursed, hoisting herself up on the rocks. She slipped twice, slapped Val’s proffered hand away, then finally made it out of the water. Val reached out for her again, but Nyma shied away, her turbulent expression indecipherable. “ _No,_ ” she said. “I don’t want to hold hands and sit in a circle or whatever shit you think we’re going to do, okay? Just—Just--”

She broke off with a wordless growl and stalked for the door, still dripping water. She didn’t even pause to grab a towel, and she actually snarled at Meri when she poked her head out of the changing room in confusion.

The door slid shut behind Nyma, a heavy silence falling together with it, and Lance looked helplessly from Val to Meri.

“Shit,” Val hissed. She sprinted over to the towels, patted herself dry, then grabbed a bath robe and struggled into it as she sprinted for the door. “Sorry,” she said to the others. “I don’t know—I think that—I’m sorry. I’ll talk to her. You guys—just—do whatever. We’ll be back soon. I hope.”

Speechless, Lance watched her go, then dropped silently onto a rocky outcropping. “What the hell just happened?”

* * *

“You stupid fucking cat,” Nyma growled, staring at the Blue Lion through the open elevator doors. She jabbed at the button for level ten, where the bridge back to the castle’s central structure was—the same button she’d pressed the first time, not that the elevator had paid any more attention to the command then than it did now. “What did you do, hijack the elevator?”

Nyma tried a different button, pressing it so hard her finger ached, but still nothing happened. She shivered, the hangar air uncomfortably cool against her wet skin.

 _That’s your own dumbass fault, Nyma,_ she told herself. _Could’ve at least grabbed a towel._

But she hadn’t, and now Blue was just _staring_ at her, holding her captive in the freaking hangar. As if that wasn’t the very first place the others would look. She considered entrenching herself in the elevator itself, but with her luck Blue would release her hold as soon as Lance or Val or Meri called the elevator, and then Nyma would be stuck in a confined space with people who wouldn’t be content just staring at her.

Letting out a strangled cry, Nyma stalked forward, her bare feet slapping against the floor. She left a trail of water behind her, turning the floor slick, and she had to reign in her irritation before she slipped and brained herself on Blue’s foot.

“Are you at least going to let me in?” she asked, hugging herself as she drew closer to Blue. It really was cold in here, but she knew Lance had added several fleece blankets to the foil blanket that came standard with the paladins' emergency kit. It wasn’t clothes, but it was better than freezing her ass off while she waited for the fallout of her hissy fit.

Hell, maybe she’d get really lucky and Blue would realize she didn’t want to talk with anyone. She’d seen first hand that a lion’s shield could keep anyone out—even the other paladins, if that was what Blue wanted.

Then again, why would Blue ever choose Nyma over the others?

Blue rumbled at that, but she obligingly lowered her head to let Nyma into the cockpit. Nyma found herself a blanket, wrapped it around her shoulders, and flopped down in the pilot seat—only then noticing that the cockpit had rearranged itself again, adding a third seat to the left. Stomach churning, Nyma twisted, searching for the fourth chair.

There was none.

“Nyma?”

Nyma moaned, drawing her knees up to her forehead as Val’s voice drifted up the ramp. “Last chance to spare me the humiliation,” she muttered at Blue, who of course gave no response.

“Nyma?” Val’s voice was closer now, her footsteps soft on the cockpit floor. “Are you in here?”

Nyma didn’t answer immediately, hoping against hope Val would leave her alone. She wouldn’t think the cockpit was empty, of course; Nyma’s water trail was damning all on its own. But maybe she would see that Nyma just wanted to be alone for a little while.

Val’s breath caught as she reached the top of the ramp and saw the new addition to the floor plan. The sound was another dagger in Nyma’s heart, and she sank down further in the chair, resisting the hands that tried to pull her arms away from her head.

“Nyma.” Val stopped pulling, but her hands lingered on Nyma’s wrists, skin so hot it burned. “Can we talk about this? What happened back there?”

“Nothing,” Nyma said. “It’s stupid.”

Val was quiet for a long moment before she retreated, her hands leaving icy imprints on Nyma’s skin. Nyma lifted her head just far enough to peer over her crossed arms at Val, who had taken a seat in her chair, a few feet from Nyma’s right side. She stared at her feet, pain splashed across her face.

The silence stretched between them. Nyma wanted to break it—an odd urge, for her, after ten years of Rolo and Beezer having to tease her out of indignant silent spells and petty spats that left Nyma ignoring one or both of her crewmates for hours on end. She was petulance incarnate, and she never bowed first.

She would have now, if she’d had the first clue how.

“We don’t know each other very well, do we?”

There was a mournful note in Val’s voice that Nyma had never heard before. It dug at her, compounding her guilt into a hulking, howling thing that tried to eat her whole.

“No one knows me,” Nyma said, part defense, part apology. “Just Rolo and Beezer.”

“I want to know you, though. And I want you to know me.”

Nyma sighed, propping her chin on her arms. “It’s not that easy, Val.”

“I know.” Val rolled her head to the side, smiling sadly. “I know. You’re not the only one who’s trying to avoid the ugly. But… can’t we start somewhere? Not with all the deep, dark, dear-diary stuff, but… I don’t know. Why don’t you want to sync with us?”

“I _do_ want to,” Nyma said, horrified to hear her own voice crack. “That’s the problem.”

“Why?”

Nyma shook her head, glaring at the ceiling. There was a hatch there she’d never noticed before. An emergency exit, maybe, or another maintenance access. She traced its lines, ignoring the tears that were gathering in her eyes.

“What Lance and Meri were talking about,” Nyma said. Her voice fell flat, which was better than the uncontrolled emotions, but it still wavered dangerously. “The ocean. The—the Heart. Did you see it, too?”

Val hummed thoughtfully. “I think so? It wasn’t an ocean, though. It was a river, I think. Just… rushing water, sweeping me along. I should have been scared, but for some reason I wasn’t, not until the end.”

“What happened at the end?”

“There was a waterfall,” Val said, her eyes staring at something Nyma couldn’t see. “The biggest waterfall I’ve ever seen. I didn’t even see it coming. One second I was in the water, and the next it was open air, and I was staring down at this tiny pool what felt like ten miles below, and I was falling. Then I was back in the hot springs.”

Nyma grunted, trying to work up a better response than that. “Sounds freaky.”

Val smiled, but the expression fizzled quickly. “Why? What did you see?”

“Nothing.” Nyma caught a flash of shock on Val’s face and turned aside, the tears returning in force. “The springs vanished, and I could tell _something_ was different, but I wasn’t in an ocean, or a river, or anything like that. It was just… static.” She closed her eyes and she got virtually the same effect from staring at her own eyelids: not true black, but fuzzy gray layered over with afterimages and the barest hint of orangey-mud where the light bled through her skin.

Val’s fingers brushed against the top of Nyma’s foot and she shivered, looking over.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Val said fiercely. “Okay, so you didn’t make it all the way into the astral plane. You heard Meri—it takes time. Lance and Meri have been bonded to Blue for years now.”

“And you?”

Val hesitated. “Maybe the crystals make me more sensitive to things like this? I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t care. You’re a paladin, same as any of us.”

“Am I?”

“Sure you are. Didn’t you notice?” Val smiled, tapping Nyma’s foot twice and catching her eye. She glanced upward, and Nyma followed her gaze.

The hatch on the ceiling was glowing now, edged in faint blue light. Nyma’s chest tightened, and she stood on numb legs, reaching up for the lever that released the hatch. It slid aside soundlessly, and a ladder descended. Nyma stared at it until Val touched the small of her back, leaning into her side.

“Go on,” Val whispered.

It was all the encouragement Nyma needed. She seized the rungs of the ladder and hauled herself upward, her blanket falling to the floor as her toes curled around the cool, smooth rungs. The ladder led up a short, narrow chute into a gunner’s nest, a hemispherical chamber rising from the crown of Blue’s head. The fourth chair—Nyma’s chair—was here, nestled behind the weapons controls.

Val squeezed into the small space behind her, wrapping her arms around Nyma’s waist. “Told you. Blue knows what she’s doing.”

Nyma smiled, her throat too thick for words. Blue rumbled in her chest, pride and affection bowling her over. _You are mine,_ that rumble seemed to say. _You belong here._ Nyma nodded, folding her hand over Val’s as she looked around the chamber.

She belonged.

Crazy as it seemed, she actually belonged here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a reminder that I'm going to be taking a couple weeks off from this story. Holidays and other projects (and the release of the latest ~~door stopper~~ book in my favorite series) are always time saps, and then I had car troubles to deal with this past week, which chewed right through the last of my buffer. I'm going to take this week to finish up a couple of my other projects, then dive back into Duality with the Olkarion Arc. At a guess, that will mean two weeks without an update, coming back on December 11th, but that may change depending on life. As always, you can catch me on Tumblr @squirenonny for updates.


	9. The Lifeless Wood

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The paladins left their families on New Altea--all aside from Hunk's moms and Lance's mom, who have joined the team on the castle-ship, along with Thace and several dozen other New Alteans. Karen's adjunct bond with the Green Lion allows her and Pidge to sense each other, albeit vaguely.
> 
> Team Voltron has decided that their next target is Olkarion, which is currently being occupied by the Galra Empire. Pidge and Ryner left to do some reconnaissance, leaving the other paladins to pass the time on the castle-ship. Allura found Edi, one of the Galra kiddos, attempting to make a connection with the Black Lion, while Keith and Matt concocted a plan to share the red bayard, passing it back and forth mid-battle, and set to training.
> 
> Meanwhile, Lance organized a spa day for the Blues as a way to release some of their tension and start talking about the various ghosts that haunt them. He found some success on that front, and the day culminated in all of them entering the astral plane, known as the Heart of the Lion. Nyma didn't fully enter the Heart, but that didn't stop Blue from creating new stations in her cockpit for all four of her pilots.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back! Sorry for the longer than anticipated hiatus. Life hit me hard this last month, and it took longer than I wanted to get back on my feet. But I'm doing better now, and back on track with Duality. We should be good to go with the regular weekly updates through the rest of Act I. For those of you who celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas! To those that don't, I hope you had a happy Hanukkah, will have a happy Kwanza and a happy New Year, and that any other celebrations you may have this winter season are full of joy and relaxation.
> 
> Special warning for this chapter for a brief scene of police brutality. Skip from "A commotion on the street" to the next scene break.

Olkarion was as beautiful as Ryner remembered. The jeweled tones of the forest where she’d spent the last eight years of her life, fighting the Galra for every inch of land; the towering mountains known at the Spine that divided the continent in two; the glittering steal sea on the horizon where the City began. At the dawn of the electronic era, when the Olkari had still lived mostly in Vivasi, the Living Wood, a few brave souls had crossed the Spine to settle on the plane, then called the Deadlands. Dozens of city-states had popped up, but over the millennia, they’d spread across the Deadlands and fused into a single mega-city—called Inanimasi, the Lifeless Wood—that housed nearly the entire Olkari population.

The towers of Capitol Circuit stirred Ryner’s nostalgia. She’d once lived in a residential sub-circuit near there, her days spent heading up a team of researchers. It felt a lifetime since she’d last taken the transit to work, tuning her personal cube to the latest engineering lectures.

Simpler times. Ryner hadn’t thought about her old routine in so long that the homesickness caught her by surprise, a lump rising in her throat as she and Pidge brought Green in low over the forest near the northern coast, where the mountains dwindled and a few isolated towns still survived off the land. The Galra hadn’t spared this area much thought. The Olkari here fished the sea or mined the foothills for ore that was shipped to Inanimasi to be processed, or tended groves of trees cultivated not for defense or surveillance, but to optimize food production.

Ryner’s grandparents had lived in a town such as this, long before Ryner herself was born. They’d come to the City seeking work. What would her life have been like if they hadn’t? Would she still be up north, keeping her head down, praying the Galra never turned their sight on her home? Would she have ever known about Voltron’s return?

Pidge squirmed in their seat, nervously checking Green’s cloak for the third time in ten minutes. Ryner’s emotions must have been bleeding through again.

“Sorry,” she said, seizing what remained of her calm and dredging it to the forefront of her mind.

Pidge shrugged, not looking up from the dashboard, and responded with silent sympathy. It was home; they understood that, even if they hadn’t expected to be so nostalgic for a mosquito-infested jungle.

Ryner laughed at that, remembering how unhappy Pidge had been to have to stick to the forest during their last visit, rather than venturing into the City. They’d been acclimating to Ryner’s gardens on the castle-ship, though, so perhaps this time things would be different.

Pidge snorted.

Rumbling amusement, Green flooded the bond with the scents of evergreen needles and stagnant water and tropical flowers Ryner had seen once, some way south of her cell’s base of operations. Pidge made a gagging noise, but their presence in the bond wasn’t as disgusted as they liked to pretend. Ryner breathed in the scents, searching them for deeper intent. Green had adapted for her pilots somewhat, constraining herself to words when she wanted to communicate complex ideas, but Ryner was trying to learn her language.

From what Ryner had heard of the other lions, Green was the most flexible in her communication, and the most varied. Where the others mostly limited themselves to images, words, and in Yellow’s case, a song, Green often slipped into something very like scent—a powerful language in the natural world, to be sure, but a difficult one for either humans or Olkari to decipher.

Green perked up as Ryner reached out, slipping deeper into the bond, where nonverbal communication was easier. The scents swirled around her, dancing on the edge of understanding. The aroma of wildflowers, the musk of rich earth and old leaf litter, overlaid with the sharp bite of fresh blood. The war was being fought in the forest these days, with small cells like Ryner’s still resisting the Galra occupation.

Green shifted to scents of hot metal and refuse, projecting a sense of confusion as though to ask why they were going to Inanimasi instead of finding Ryner’s cell.

 _Zarkon’s greatest foothold is in the City,_ Ryner explained. She tried to translate this into Green’s language, but it was like trying to compose a song in a style she’d only just discovered. _We were never able to establish contact with those we left behind. Any information we’re going to get about fortifications, we’re going to have to gather ourselves._

Green assented, and they curved south on the west side of the mountains, passing undetected over the last stretch of open grassland before the City limits. There was no hesitation in Green’s motions; she trusted her paladins enough to do what they wanted. She was just curious. So often Voltron went to where the fighting was, so when they deviated from that course, Green wanted to understand why.

They started with a pass over the City, flying high and slow. Pidge monitored their stealth systems and watched the comms for signs they’d been detected while Ryner ran scans. Green compiled the results, commenting occasionally when she found something that didn’t align with Ryner’s expectations—a lower proportion of Galra biosignatures, and more concentrated in administrative centers; far more stockpiled weapons, and far fewer in the streets. The comms channels were full of casual chatter, as well, and the voices on the military frequencies spoke Karii as often as Galran.

“This doesn’t feel like an occupation,” Pidge muttered, unease swirling beneath their outward calm. They’d set down on the far side of the mountains, well south from Capitol, to let Green recharge her cloaking device. The preliminary scans were displayed on the viewscreen before them, together with visual recordings Green had taken.

“Guard patrols on the streets, though.” Ryner pointed at one such patrol—two Galra officers with hands on their holstered pistols. She spotted another some blocks on, and her mouth ran dry.

Pidge leaned forward, squinting. “Are those… Olkari?”

Olkari dressed in Imperial uniforms.

Desperation, Ryner told herself. It was desperation that drove her people to cooperate with the Galra Empire. Desperation, and perhaps opportunism. Take any large group of people, and you were bound to find both. It said nothing about Inanimasi as a whole. There had been resistance eight years ago, when Ryner and her cell were driven out. King Lubos had resisted, and he would continue to resist as long as he had to. Olkarion was strong, her people proud. They had weathered worse storms than this.

“Did you hear anything on the comms?” Ryner asked, though she already knew the answer. Linked as they were inside the Green Lion, they could keep very few secrets from each other.

Still Pidge hesitated. “It sounded just like regular comms chatter,” they said. “We’d need more information to draw any conclusions.”

But the Olkari here were on much better terms than Ryner had anticipated. “Lubos help us,” she muttered. “We’ll make one more pass before we pull back and contact the castle. I want to get a closer look at the manufacturing district.”

“And we can take another Quintessence reading while we’re at it. Start to build a baseline for when we go looking for hot spots.”

Ryner nodded.

She hadn’t expected this to be easy. Ten years since the Galra had invaded her planet. Eight since they took Inanimasi. Plenty of time for the Galra to sink in their claws—but she’d continued to fight. Thousands of her people had continued to fight after they fled the City. Hundreds had died, entire cells wiped out by Galra raids. What little they’d heard from beyond the mountains had been encouraging. They’d thought they had the support of the rest of their people.

For years they’d been planning a mass assault on Inanimasi. The cells in the forest had stockpiled weapons, trained up soldiers, and worked tirelessly to establish contacts inside the City. Ryner had imagined a mass uprising, a tidal wave of angry Olkari driving the Galra out in a swift, furious push. She’d known Olkari would die in that fight. Perhaps on some level she’d acknowledged that some few Olkari would side with the Galra, but it had never felt real.

She’d never allowed for the possibility that she might be in the minority.

Pidge reached out through the bond, their sympathy clumsy but heartfelt, and Ryner smiled. “They might not be as totally on board with this as they seem to be,” Pidge offered. “We don’t know what lies or threats the Galra command is using to keep them in line.”

“Yes.” Ryner reached to clear away the scan results from the screen as the cloaking indicator turned green. “No sense jumping to conclusions before we have all the information.”

“Exactly.” Pidge dropped their feet to the floor and took up the controls. “Ready for the second pass?”

Ryner nodded, pushing aside thoughts of the battle to come. The exterior view rippled briefly as the cloak settled back into place, and then they were airborne, Green gathering more visuals of the City as they circled toward the Southern Manufacturing Circuit. Pidge continued to monitor the comms, compiling lists of frequencies and codes and pinpointing transmitters and receivers.

The workday was drawing to an end as they neared the factories, people spilling out into street. Ryner closed her eyes, surrendering to Green’s perspective, and searched for signs of discontent. She wasn’t sure it would have soothed her nerves much to see that her people were suffering and oppressed, but the ease with which they talked and laughed, the bright smiles and new, clean clothes, the groups that headed off to open-air cafes, the bored-looking Olkari that loaded rifles and grenades and other, less familiar devices into Galra shuttles—all of this turned Ryner’s stomach.

This was not a people enslaved. It was a people prospering under the rule of the Galra Empire.

“It shouldn’t be like this,” Ryner whispered, realizing too late she’d nudged Pidge’s hands to take them toward the next block of factories. It was the same story here—cheerful workers, bustling businesses, and weapons handed over to the Galra without complaint.

When she finally found the shadow of martial law she’d been expecting, it was more chilling than the image she’d had in her head of her people in slaves’ rags.

An Olkari youth stood guard at the end of an alley, her friend further on holding a rag to his mouth as he graffitied the wall. Pidge slowed as Ryner watched the pair. It was difficult, from this range, to make out what the graffiti depicted, but she recognized the sigil of the Galra Empire at the heart of the design.

A commotion on the street. The girl standing watch ducked back into the alley, waving toward her friend, who paused. A moment later, a guard patrol broke away from the evening crowd, and the girl ran. She grabbed her friend by the wrist, and he dropped his can of spray paint as they fled. Another pair of guards appeared ahead of them, hemming them in. All four guards were Olkari.

The boy cowered back, glancing over his shoulder at the other guards. The girl produced a _novus_ gauntlet—a malleable weapon Ryner had modeled her organic amplifiers after—and slipped it over her hand, dropping into a defensive stance.

The fight was over quickly. The girl managed to take down the first guard, changing her _novus_ to a pistol and firing before the guards had time to react. But another guard ripped the boy away from her, throwing him to the ground. The girl turned at his cry, and a guard hit her in the back of the head. She landed hard, _novus_ flaring as she began to reshape it.

A guard brought his foot down on her wrist, crushing metal and bone, and before the girl could recover, a boot connected with her gut.

Pidge cried out in horror as the beating continued, both youths curling in on themselves, shielding what they could from the vicious blows that showed no signs of slowing. Ryner’s own horror was a quieter thing, and she reached out to physically stop Pidge from taking them down.

“We can’t,” she said, Pidge’s fury resonating deep in her gut. “They can’t know we’re here.”

They stayed, though. Flinching with every blow, they stayed and watched until the guards tired of their game and dragged the youths—bloodied and limping—to their feet. Pidge wanted to stop it, Ryner knew, but they understood. Surprise was the one advantage they had in this fight. Throwing it away now to save two lives would cost many more in the long run.

That didn’t make it any easier to watch as the youths were handcuffed and marched off to a waiting transport. Dozens of Olkari watched, silent and somber, as the transport took off in the direction of the nearest Justice Circuit, but none moved to interfere. They simply muttered curses under their breath and went on their way.

This was not a new sight in Inanimasi.

Green drifted in the direction the transport had gone, Pidge’s presence boiling with helpless rage, and Ryner turned her mind toward safer goals.

“We’re done here, Pidge,” she said, pulling back on their hands to halt Green’s drift. “Let’s see if we can find my cell. The sooner we get in touch with the others, the sooner we can put things right.”

Pidge nodded, albeit reluctantly, and turned them toward the east, aiming for a mountain pass that took them back to Vivasi and the more familiar threats that lurked beneath the trees.

* * *

The cell had moved since Ryner left.

She wasn’t surprised to discover this; the forest cells were mobile by design, and even when things went well they rotated between three semi-permanent camps on a randomized schedule. Their weapons, shields, shelters, food—everything they needed was mobile except the Groves themselves, and seeds and amplifiers were the first priority in the case of an evacuation.

Much of what she knew about this semi-nomadic lifestyle, Ryner had learned from the Vivaskari—a coalition of nations who lived and worked the massive Vivasi region. When the Inanimaskari had moved to the Deadlands eons ago to begin working metal and building the City, the Vivaskari remained behind, improving upon the old arts.

Ryner had only met a handful of Vivaskari since fleeing Inanimasi, for although a few isolated cells had come forward to help the Inanimaskari rebels, the coalition kept their distance. And who could blame them? Though the Vivaskari supplied much of the City’s food, medicine, and raw materials, they had always kept their distance. When the Galra arrived, they spared no thought for the so-called savages who lived beyond the mountains. Zarkon cared only for weapons and other technology he could use in his war.

It only made sense to lie low and pray the Galra contented themselves with the rest of the continent. Had she been in the Vivaskari’s place, Ryner likely would have done the same.

With Green’s scanners—more powerful than anything Ryner or her cell had managed to build from wood and pulp—she could see the clusters of Olkari dotting the eastern half of the continent. There were more Vivaskari than Ryner had thought, and they gathered closer than ever before to the Inanimaskari cells, whose clumsy camouflage stood out like invasive species beneath the forest canopy.

Hope pulsed in Ryner’s chest as Pidge took them low over the region Ryner’s cell had frequented before the robeast attack. The cloak was running out again, but Ryner wasn’t worried. She’d been putting out her cell’s signal—using specially encoded spores—since they cleared the mountain, and sooner or later someone would respond.

“You really have to teach me to use that,” Pidge said, glancing over at her.

Ryner was up to her elbows in the special interface she’d devised on the day she met Pidge. Back then, it had all been improvised, but Green had taken to the amplifier at once, integrating the wood and vines into her systems and reinforcing it with metal and conduit. What once had looked like a very shoddy imitation of a _novus_ core now bore elements of Green and both her paladins, making something undeniably unique—and vastly superior to any amplifier Ryner had used before.

Ryner held the composition of her coded spores in her mind, impressing them upon Green through the bond and letting the amplifier craft another signal pulse to release on the forest below. “You’ve been practicing with the headset I gave you?” she asked Pidge, who hesitated.

“I mean… Sorta?”

Chuckling, Ryner pushed forward a borrowed memory of Pidge ignoring their small plot of land in Ryner’s garden, using the amplifier instead to refine Rover’s targeting system. The little drone sat now in the rear of the cockpit, charging atop a small cradle. “You are quite gifted at speaking to metal—what you call technopathy. I won’t deny that. But speaking to plants is also part of the Olkari art.”

Pidge narrowed their eyes, perhaps trying to gauge whether Ryner was being sincere. Before they made their determination, however, the currents of Quintessence in the forest below them shifted. Ryner felt it through the amplifier, and her antennae quivered against the inside of her helmet. Green translated it into something Pidge could decipher—though they had already picked up on Ryner’s shift in attention and leaned forward to scan the forest below.

“Your cell?” they asked.

Ryner nodded. There was no visible change in the canopy, but the pulse of Quintessence contained the coordinates for the cell’s new camp, which Ryner relayed to Pidge. Green helped convert them into the standard for Altean navigation, and they changed course. The cloak dissolved as they approached a nondescript area where a canyon split the forest. A river flowed at the bottom of the canyon, but Pidge stopped near the upper lip and eased Green into a cave that was well camouflaged from above.

Olkari guards melted out of the shadows, spears at the ready. Ryner recognized them both—Zori and Joska, two of the younger trainees. Ryner herself had taught Joska to shape the forest, and she now wore a gauntlet whose gem glowed in anticipation of a fight. The moss patterning the stone walls of the cave flaked, peeling back in layers like a lizard’s scales, then suddenly smoothed as Joska recognized the Green Lion.

Beside her, Zori stared slack-jawed, his spear drifting aside. He’d still been a trainee when Ryner left, and it jarred her to see him on guard duty, even here in a cave that likely saw very little activity.

Zori and Joska snapped to attention as Ryner exited her lion, Pidge trailing after her.

“Elder Ryner!” Zori said, beaming. He twitched, nearly breaking form, then caught himself, and Ryner smiled.

“It’s good to see you both,” she said, pulling off her helmet and nodding to them. Zori waited just long enough to be respectful, then bounded forward. He seemed torn between greeting Ryner and investigating the Green Lion, and when she waved him on, his eyes lit up with glee.

Pidge turned to watch him go, arching an eyebrow as he stopped just short of Green and screamed softly into his hands. “A man after my own heart,” they muttered.

Joska sighed, clapping her hand to her breast as she approached. “Forgive him, Elder. He’s as excitable as ever, especially over the old tech.”

“Old tech?” Pidge asked.

“Electronics,” Joska explained. “Zori’s one of those people who just can’t get used to life this side of the Spine.”

“Can’t say I blame him.” Pidge glanced over their shoulder at Zori, then shrugged. “So, we gonna head up, or are you staying in the caves now?”

“We’ve got a Grove up above.” Joska gestured to a ladder set into a recess in the wall. “But we’re building up our defenses below ground.” She hesitated, her gauntlet glowing blue to indicate an incoming message. “Pardon me, Elder—ah—”

Ryner held up her hand. “Please, call me Ryner. I’m not your Elder anymore.”

That seemed to discomfit Joska, but she nodded. “Right. Ryner, then, um—Elder Aransha asked me to bring you to her. She’s eager to know what brings the Green Paladins of Voltron back to Olkarion.”

“Of course. Pidge?”

“Do I need to be at this meeting?” Pidge asked, sensing Ryner’s question. “Cause if not I can get in touch with the castle. Let’s get this ball rolling, right?”

Ryner nodded, and Pidge turned back toward Green, pausing to tell Zori about a custom sensor array on the lion’s underbelly that had caught his eye. Zori listened with rapt attention as Pidge began to wax poetic about the wonders of technology, and Ryner shook her head. She’d have to make sure the both of them saw the sun at some point, or they might just waste away down here in these caves.

But that could wait. Nodding to Joska, Ryner followed her in the direction of Aransha’s conference room.

* * *

It took all of ten minutes to catch Shiro up on the basics of what they’d found. Pidge stretched it to fifteen because once they were done, they’d have no excuse not to leave the Green Lion and be _social._

Not that the Olkari weren’t nice people and all—and by and large appropriately obsessed with technology, so Pidge could probably find someone to infodump at if they really tried. It was just that they’d been running so hard for so long, dealing with people who needed saving and politicians who needed swaying and refugees who needed comforting and new teammates who needed to be bonded with. And all that wasn’t counting the stress of fighting with their mother.

It was better now—a million times so. Their mother was a distant, vaguely supportive presence in their mind that was easily ignored, and they didn’t have to worry about turning the corner and running into someone who was going to tell them, again, that they needed to let the adults do the fighting.

Pidge’s throat tightened at the thought, and Shiro’s voice petered out in the middle of hashing out a plan of approach—something about bringing the other lions in and scouting nearby systems for somewhere they could hide the castle-ship; Pidge hadn’t really been listening.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine,” Pidge said, voice clipped. They winced. “Sorry. I’m just… tired.”

It was a thin excuse, but Shiro didn’t call them on it. Pidge wondered if he’d seen the cracks forming. It wasn’t about their mother, not really, not anymore, but those arguments had bled Pidge dry. They felt wrung out, ready to burst into tears over anything, even over a problem that had already been solved. They hated when they got this way.

“Working on any new mods for Green?” Shiro asked.

Pidge lifted their head, grimacing at the unspoken offer. They should have known. The Voltron bond gave the paladins a certain amount of insight into each others’ thoughts—and for someone like Shiro, who was naturally observant, it put him dangerously near actual mind reading.

Because Pidge didn’t want to leave the Green Lion. They couldn’t put on a happy face and dredge up a facsimile of small talk and brush elbows with Ryner’s cell. They knew she’d left them to contact the castle as a way of letting them prepare for the social part of the evening, but the truth was they weren’t ready to go out there. They weren’t going to be ready any time soon. They had a finite amount of energy to spend these days, and it had to go to liberating Olkarion first, planning and preparation second, and dealing with strangers ideally not at all.

But Shiro had his own duties to see to. As much as Pidge appreciated the tacit offer of a few more minutes away from the social labyrinth, they couldn’t take it up on him.

With a shrug, they stretched their hands above their head, letting their feet drop to the floor. “I’ve got a few things in the works, I guess. I’ll tell you about them when you get here.”

One corner of Shiro’s mouth lifted in a smile. “All right. See you in a couple hours, then.”

“See you.” Pidge leaned forward and switched the comms off, then sagged. They reached out to Green, prodding gently until she opened her BLIP-tech sensors to them. It took only an instant to confirm what the guard had said before—most of the cell was gathered in the caves, with only a handful up in the Grove.

So. The Grove it was.

Pidge grabbed their laptop, the new pair of headphones they’d brought from Earth, and a handful of stim toys, then headed out of the Green Lion. The other guard—Zero…? No, Zomi…? Whatever his name was, he was still outside, ostensibly guarding the caves but staring openly at the Green Lion. He perked up as Pidge came down the ramp, lifting a hand in greeting.

Pidge’s hands were full, which was as good an excuse as any not to return the greeting, and they muttered a few pleasantries as they scurried past, head down and eyes fixed on the bottom rung of the ladder.

They stalled a moment at the bottom of the ladder, hastily stuffing everything into their computer bag and slinging it over their shoulder, freeing up their hands to climb. The Olkari guard’s eyes burned holes in the back of Pidge’s armor, but he didn’t stop them, and Pidge didn’t offer an explanation for their hasty exit.

Once outside, they breathed a little easier. Maybe that was the fact that there were only two Olkari in sight up here, neither particularly interested in the human who had just appeared from the caves. Maybe it was the fact that Ryner had gotten inside Pidge’s head and left behind some of her inexplicable fondness for all things green and squishy.

Whatever the case, Pidge cracked their neck, nodded to a couple of patrolling guards, and went in search of somewhere quiet and secluded to hide for the next few hours.

Once they found a promising spot, they put on their headphones, turned up the music, and opened the file containing everything they knew about their dad’s fate. It was still a work in progress, stuffed full of several hundred snippets of larger files that Pidge’s search had flagged as potentially containing useful information.

They began the agonizing process of weeding out the irrelevant data and sorting the rest for future consideration, ignoring the footsteps that occasionally passed at the edge of their vision, beyond a thick screen of bluish fern-like fronds.

Progress would have been quicker if Pidge knew what they were looking for, but they were stumbling through a dark room on this one. This first pass through the data had been a simple keyword search—less simple with two dozen keywords, ranging from _human_ and _Project Balmera_ to the Imperial designation for Earth and their father’s prisoner ID. Well, their best guess at his ID. Shiro’s had been 117-9875, Matt’s 118-9875. Keith had confirmed that 9875 was the year they’d been captured, according to the Imperial calendar, which meant there was a good chance the first three digits of Sam’s ID were either 116 or 119.

Neither showed up anywhere in Pidge’s files. That wasn’t surprising. They had very few prisoner logs, aside from those corresponding to CORE and its two subsidiaries, Project Balmera and Project Robeast. They didn’t have records of the _Persephone’s_ capture, or of where her crew had been sent after that.

Most of the other flagged documents were similarly useless. Plenty of references to humans where Shiro and Matt were concerned, but none that might have been Pidge’s dad. Nothing to suggest that a noteworthy prisoner had been enrolled in another CORE lab somewhere in the universe.

Most likely, the ships, labs, and bases Pidge had pulled files from quite simply weren’t connected to whatever Zarkon had done with their father. Probably they weren’t using the right keywords, or the relevant information was talked about in deliberately vague terms to make this sort of data mining ineffective.

Possibly someone had gone through and excised any reference to Commander Samuel Holt. If someone had made the connection between Pidge and Matt and the last member of the _Persephone’s_ crew, they would have every reason to keep Pidge from finding out what had happened to him.

None of this meant that Pidge didn’t have to go through every last flag in their dataset. Somewhere out there there was a clue, and they’d be damned if they missed it because they were tired and their eyes were starting to dry out from staring at a computer screen for… how long had it been?

They checked the time—nearly three hours since they’d come out here—groaned, and rubbed their eyes. When they opened them again, it was to find Keith leaning over them, ears cocked in curiosity.

Pidge yelped, fumbling their computer. In trying to right it, they banged their elbow on the tree trunk behind them and muttered a curse. Rubbing their elbow, they pulled off their headphones and glared at Keith.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to sneak up on a person?”

“The opposite, actually,” Keith said, sitting down across from them, cross-legged, his knees nearly touching Pidge’s.

Pidge stared at him, unimpressed. “Well, it’s rude. What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you…?” Keith frowned. “Ryner said she hadn’t seen you since you guys arrived. Matt didn’t believe her when she said you were okay.”

“So he sent you to find me?”

Keith shrugged. “No. I just figured you’d be wherever the fewest people were.”

“Oh.” Pidge relaxed, suddenly understanding what Keith was getting at. “You’re hiding from the world, too.”

“No?”

“Uh-huh.” Pidge patted the ground beside them, scooting over to make room. Keith stared at them for a moment, then came over, drumming his hands on his knees as he stared around the small, shady spot Pidge had claimed for themself.

He sucked on his lip. “Nice place you’ve got here.”

Pidge grunted.

Keith turned, his eyes landing on Pidge’s computer screen. They resisted the urge to turn it away from him. “Trying to find your dad?” Keith asked.

“Yeah.”

“Have you… Have you found anything useful?”

“Not yet.” Pidge saved their work and closed out of the file, staring intently at the task bar. “I don’t really want to talk about it right now, okay?”

Keith held up his hands. To his credit, he dropped that line of questioning instantly, and Pidge forced themself to unwind. It was silent between them for a few minutes, Pidge flipping idly between other projects, half-finished code work, and a few mindless games they had installed…

After a while, Keith pulled out his mother’s knife and began to fiddle with it, twisting the blade this way and that, seemingly transfixed by the way it caught the light. Pidge found themself a little transfixed, for that matter, and they tore their eyes away, reaching into their pocket for the spinner they’d stashed there—little more than a loop of hemp strung with washers and nuts of various sizes, spaced out by knots, but it moved well and the hemp’s texture was an added bonus.

“You still have your mom’s knife,” Pidge began.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Fair enough.” Pidge turned their spinner over in their hand, running their thumb along one corner of a heavy hex nut. Their eyes slid back to Keith’s knife. “Hey, Keith?”

“Mm?”

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

The motion of Keith’s knife slowed to a stop, and he glanced their way. Pidge tried to lift their head to meet his gaze, but the motion stalled almost before it began.

“Okay,” Keith said slowly. “And what’s that?”

Pidge wrapped the hemp loop around their hand and twirled a wingnut between thumb and forefinger. “Do Galra know what autism is?”

Keith cocked his head to the side. “ _Autism...?_ ” He pronounced the word carefully, his brow furrowing. “I don’t think that’s translating. At least, I’ve never heard anything like it.”

“Of course not.” Pidge huffed. “Well, I mean, there have to be some psychologists in the Empire somewhere, right? Mental health professionals? Councilors?”

Keith laid his knife across his lap and picked at a loose thread on the leather grip. “Something like that, sure.” He paused, turning slightly toward them. “Why?”

“I’m just curious.” They paused, new questions coming to mind the more they thought about it. Was _was_ the field of psychology like in the Galra Empire? Pidge had to imagine Zarkon’s soldiers experienced PTSD as often as human soldiers—unless that wasn’t something that could happen to Galra, which raised a whole slew of questions. The Galra Empire didn’t seem like the sort of place you could be open about something like, say, depression—but what did that mean? That people got good at hiding it? That the people who had mood disorders were shuffled off to the side where Zarkon didn’t have to think about them? How similar was Galra brain chemistry—or _anatomy,_ for that matter—to human?

Keith drew his legs up to his chest, silencing Pidge’s runaway thoughts. “They’re called examiners,” he said. “You have to pass their tests before you can take your Proof.”

“Proof?”

Keith tensed. “A… rite of passage, I guess you could say. Part of the enlistment process for soldiers, and a kind of final exam in officer training.”

Pidge didn’t like the sound of that, but Keith was holding his knife like he might pop over into fight or flight territory at any second. “So… what? These examiners have to clear you for active duty?”

“Basically. You get special assignments if they score you high enough, but what you really need to worry about is if they declare you incompetent or deviant.”

“Sounds like a shitty mental health system, but go on.”

Keith shrugged. “There’s not much more to say. They ask you a bunch of questions and score you on all these metrics. Intelligence, loyalty, aggression, resilience.”

“What the hell is resilience?”

“How well you perform under pressure. You have to solve puzzles under all sorts of different conditions.” He scratched the back of his neck, his ears sloping backwards. “I kinda just memorized the answers for all the other tests, or I’d… I’d probably have failed, to be honest. Almost did fail the resilience test.”

Pidge worried a knot between their fingers. “And what happens if you fail?”

“You’re dismissed from the army.” Keith tapped his claw on his blade. “Always seemed like those people got off easy, but I guess you were shunned if you washed out of the army. All I know is people would rather die in their Proof than fail their evaluation beforehand.”

Pidge grunted, trying to pack all their disgust into the syllable. They hadn’t exactly expected the Galra army to be a shining beacon of self care, but they’d expected, well... something.

“To be fair, I have no clue what life is like outside the army.” Keith bit his lip, one canine tugging at the skin until Pidge thought he was going to draw blood. “What… what is autism?”

Pidge blew out a long breath, leaning back on their hands. “It’s hard to explain, cause it’s different for everyone. For me it mostly means sensory issues and having trouble with social interaction.”

“For you?” Keith looked up, lips parted, eyes searching Pidge’s face intently.

They turned away hastily, the sudden eye contact too much to handle. Once their eyes landed on a little sprout by their foot, though, they recognized the relief in his tone. Oh. Well, quiznak. Considering how judgmental Galra psychologists were, he’d probably been expecting some sort of accusation.

Pidge turned back to him, smiling apologetically. “Yeah, sorry. Should have prefaced with that. I’m autistic, and… I dunno. I guess I was kinda hoping that was something we had in common. Don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes you seem as confused by people as I am.”

“Huh.” Keith furrowed his brow, staring hard at a bush across from him. His ear twitched once. “I mean, I don’t exactly have a lot of experience with human culture.”

“And you never felt like an outsider in Zarkon’s army?”

Keith’s mouth hung open for a moment, and Pidge could practically taste the automatic _no_ dying on his tongue. “I guess I always figured I was just...”

He trailed off, gesturing vaguely, and Pidge propped their chin on their knee. “You always figured you were just weird?” they guessed, smiling as Keith’s head whipped toward them. “I mean, I’m not claiming to be normal—that’d be too boring—but maybe your kind of weird and my kind of weird overlap a little bit. If you want to talk or whatever.”

Keith nodded along to that, his fingers absent-mindedly tracing the edge of his dagger. “That sounds... nice.”

Pidge grinned, their legs bouncing as anticipation built up inside them, gathering behind their teeth, inside their bones. Their fingers tangled in the hemp loop in their pocket, and they grinned—probably a little too wide considering Keith had only agreed to talk, but Keith answered with a tentative smile of his own. He seemed genuinely interested in what Pidge had to say, so they drummed the fingers of their free hand on their laptop and searched for a good place to start.

Their eyes fell on Keith’s knife, and a thrill of inspiration shot through them. “Okay,” they said. “So there’s this thing called stimming.”

“Stimming.”

“Yeah,” Pidge said. “Self-stimulatory behavior, but who the fuck has time to say all that? Like… sensory things that are calming, or fun, or just feel nice.” They pulled out their hemp loop and twirled a few of the washers for Keith to see. “I’m big on tactile stims. Manipulating things with my hands, feeling textures, stuff like that. But there’s also visual stims, auditory stims, vestibular stims...” They trailed off, consciously curtailing their automatic instinct to infodump.

Keith stared at them, brow furrowed. “So… what’s the point?”

“There’s not one, really. I mean, okay, yeah, some kinds of stims are things we do when we’re overwhelmed. A way to calm down and release tension and whatever, but like… Why do neurotypicals listen to music, or go for walks, or pick up the phone and randomly call a friend? Sometimes there’s a purpose behind it, but usually they just feel like doing it, right?”

“I guess…” Keith hummed, raising a hand to his mouth and chewing on a hangnail. “But I don’t do that.”

Pidge raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t. I...” Keith frowned. “Do I?”

“You kinda do.” Pidge gestured to the knife in his lap. “The way you fiddle with that? You’re watching the light reflect off its surface, right?”

Keith bit harder at his nail, his ears sloping backwards. A moment later, they perked back up, and his hand dropped away from his mouth. “Wait, that’s a thing? The way it… When I… That’s not just me?”

Pidge reached out and patted his arm, flashing a smile. “That’s a Thing.”

“Huh.”

Pidge tipped their head to the side, watching the pinch of his brow, the ever-shifting slope of his ears. He was wrestling with something, trying to wrap his head around this. Pidge had been diagnosed back in middle school, but they still remembered some of that early discovery. Hell, they’d been making new connections right up until they left Earth, all their conversations with other auties recontextualizing things they’d always assumed were meaningless little personal quirks.

“There are other things, aren’t there?” Pidge said. “Things other people told you were weird, or forced you to stop doing.”

Keith stared at them, eyes wide. “I… yeah, I guess, I… It was disruptive.”

“Yeah.” Pidge grimaced. “You’re definitely not the only one to get that line.” They turned, swinging their arm until they found their computer bag, which they promptly upended on the ground before them. A power cord, several USBs, and more than a dozen stim toys spilled out onto the leaf litter, and Keith leaned forward, intrigued. “We,” Pidge said, “are going to reintroduce you to the wonders of stimming.”

* * *

"This place is...” Lance tipped his head back to look at the forest canopy, where strange pods hung. Nyma had never seen anything like them, and she wasn’t sure she liked having something twice her size dangling over her head.

“This place is awesome is what it is,” Hunk said. Lance shot Nyma a look behind Hunk’s back, and she snorted into her hand. Hunk was strangely defensive about a planet he’d only been to once before. Apparently the paladins’ last visit had been brief, and only a few of them had gotten the full tour of the Olkari camp. Hunk had insisted on spreading the love around, and with Val down below with Matt, Meri, and Allura talking to some Olkari healers about the local brand of magic, Nyma had gotten shuttled off to the search squad.

The “search squad” that seemed to have completely forgotten they were up here to find Pidge and Keith. Nyma would have complained, but she didn’t actually care all that much. Shiro and Ryner were sorting through the information the Greens had collected this morning, along with Aransha, the woman who had succeeded Ryner as Elder of this cell. They wouldn’t start to talk strategy until later tonight, and the earliest they would take action was tomorrow morning.

“It’s freaky,” Lance said. “Those are all, what, machine fetuses?” Shay ducked her head, laughing softly as Hunk smacked Lance’s arm, making him stumble. “What? Tell me I’m wrong.”

“They’re--” Hunk huffed, wrinkling his nose. “Prototypes.”

“This is a pregnant machine forest and it’s creepy,” Lance shot back.

Nyma rolled her eyes as Hunk began to speculate about what sorts of machines were contained within the pods. From his ramblings, Nyma gathered the Olkari grew most of their weapons and vehicles, and apparently Pidge had once hatched a hoverbike from one of the pods.

Shay trailed behind the two boys, her eyes trained on the pods overhead. Nyma fell in beside her, trying to look casual.

“So what do you think Pidge is doing up here, anyway? They don’t strike me as the _one with nature_ type.”

“Ryner did say they had taken their laptop, did she not?” Shay tilted her head, her earrings clacking against her carapace. “I would assume that means they are working on their code, or perhaps reviewing some files they have saved.”

Nyma nodded, her mouth dry. “Yeah, I… I figured it might be something like that.” She licked her lips, crossing her arms over her chest. “What do you think they’re looking for? Information about the defenses here on Olkarion?”

“Not likely,” Hunk said, dropping back suddenly to walk beside Shay. Nyma tensed, scowling at the ground ahead of them. “We haven’t gone anywhere that would have files on Olkarion. Most of what they have is prisoner records.”

“So they’re looking for their dad, then,” Nyma said, steadfastly ignoring Lance’s eyes on the side of her head. “Makes sense, I guess.”

Hunk tapped his chin, apparently not noticing the way Shay had drifted closer to Nyma, looking like she might burst into tears at any moment. Nyma jerked out of her reach, glaring at her. She didn’t want pity, and she didn’t need a hug or whatever shit Shay was offering.

“Thing is,” Hunk said, “I don’t know if they have enough to go off of. We’re going to need to do some focused strikes to get information about him specifically, but to do that, we’ll need some kind of lead, which is probably going to boil down to luck. It’s a big ol’ universe out there. Trying to find one person in it is like trying to find a little bit of sugar on a beach.”

Lance palmed his forehead, the smack of it snapping Hunk out of his musings. He glanced from Lance to Nyma and then to Shay, who had laid her hand on his arm, trying to look sympathetic.

“Oh.” Hunk’s eyes darted back to Nyma, who met his gaze with a challenge. “This is about Rolo.”

“Hunk!” Lance cried.

Hunk managed to look somewhat abashed—not that it was enough to quell the queasy storm of guilt and grief raging inside Nyma. Hunk didn’t back down, though. “You want me to ask Pidge to look for leads on Rolo when they’re looking for their dad?”

Nyma scowled. “Did I _ask_ for your help?” she snarled.

“Peace,” Shay said. “We meant no offense.”

Lance meandered over, pressing his shoulder against Nyma. Distantly, she felt a rumble of reassurance from Blue, vibrating up through Lance’s body and into Nyma. He smiled at her, a touch of sadness in his eyes. “We all want to find Rolo, Nyma. We’ll all do whatever we can to help. I’m sure Pidge wouldn’t mind keeping an eye out for any mentions of Rolo, especially if we offer to help them look for Commander Holt. That’s what family’s for.”

Nyma scoffed to cover the lump that rose in her throat. She had to dance around Hunk’s outstretched arms to avoid a bone-crushing hug, but, oddly, she appreciated the show of sympathy. It didn’t grate the same way it had when she’d first joined this ragtag band of heroes. It was actually… kind of comforting. Knowing they cared. Knowing she had a family, of sorts, as corny as that sounded.

They eventually found Keith and Pidge, the pair of them huddled in the center of a thicket, junk strewn all around them. Pidge was spinning a length of chain around their finger while Keith stretched a glob of something stringy and elastic, a look of intense concentration on his face. He dropped it instantly when he noticed the rest of them, then swore, and snatched up the now-dirt-encrusted glob, shooting a guilty look at Pidge.

“I’ve got loads of that back on the ship,” they said. “Don’t even worry about it.”

For some reason, both Hunk and Lance seemed absolutely delighted by the tableau before them. Hunk dove in with barely so much as a, _Can I…?_ He snatched up a cylinder filled with glitter and oil, grinned, and waggled it in Lance’s direction.

Lance shifted his feet anxiously, looking for all the world like a kid barely constraining himself from tearing open his birthday presents, but he at least waited for Pidge’s go-ahead before he claimed a system of interconnected shapes and started to fiddle with it.

Slowly, Keith came out of the tense, almost defensive posture he’d adopted at the sight of them all. He glanced at Pidge, who grinned. “Better take what you want before they steal it all,” Pidge muttered, cupping their hand around their mouth.

Keith tucked what looked like a torn bit of cloth into his pocket, hesitated, then added a flat green disk. Pidge grinned, and Keith returned it hesitantly.

“I’m missing something,” Nyma said, crossing her arms. She glanced to Shay, who seemed just as dumbfounded.

Pidge stuffed their computer back into their bag and stood, dusting off their armor. “Don’t worry about it. Shiro calling for us?”

“Not quite yet,” Lance said, his tongue wedged into the corner of his mouth as he continued to play with Pidge’s… puzzle? “But Matt figured it’d take a while to track you down, so we wanted to have a head start.”

“We are going to be talking strategy later, though,” Hunk said.

“Right.” Pidge heaved an over-dramatic sigh. “All right, let me just put on my extrovert mask.”

Keith snorted. He lingered near Pidge as they headed back toward the ladder, and Nyma watched, trying to tease apart the currents between them. She had no clue what they’d been doing out here together, but it had obviously meant something to both of them.

Nyma supposed she was going to have to make more of an effort to get to know Pidge if she was going to ask for their help.

 _Yeah,_ she thought as Pidge pulled out a box that buzzed in a way that made Keith’s ear flutter. They made a questioning noise, and Keith tilted his head, took the box from them, and switched it on again. _That might be easier said than done._

* * *

“There’s something more going on here.”

Matt glanced at Allura, then back at Shiro. Ryner and Aransha had long since left the conference room where they’d had their preliminary discussion, but it seemed Shiro was still hung up on the intel Ryner and Pidge had gathered.

Not that Matt could blame him. He’d spent the last hour talking with doctors about the crystals growing in his body and about the Olkari arts. Allura had hoped the Olkari might be able to offer some relevant advice about shaping Quintessence. And maybe it would have been helpful, if Matt had been able to stop thinking about the situation on the planet.

“I agree.” Matt took a seat on the table near Shiro’s elbow, tucking his legs underneath him. “Are you thinking something in particular, or…?”

Shiro sighed, dropping his head into his hand. “I just—I’m trying to wrap my head around it. There were a handful of people working with the Galra on Earth, and most of them were just following orders. Not like this—not an entire planet going along with Zarkon’s rule.”

“Zarkon rediscovered your planet less than three years ago,” Allura said, turning another chair sideways so she could sit facing Shiro. “He’s had a presence here for nearly ten.”

“I know,” Shiro said. “I just feel like we’re missing something. Where are the prisons for people who fought back? Where’s the Galra presence? These people are practically being left to rule themselves, and they’re doing so _willingly_.”

“He needs their cooperation,” Matt said. “The whole reason he came here is for their technopathy, right? He can’t just steal that and leave the people to rot. If he pisses them off, he’s out of luck.”

Allura nodded, tapping her lower lip. “He’s saving the arm-twisting for when he runs out of options, because he knows once he tries that they’ll never volunteer their services again. Not in the numbers he needs.”

Shiro paled at that, his voice going hoarse. “An alliance? You really think they’ve formed an alliance with the Empire?”

“Why?” Matt frowned, trailing a hand down Shiro’s arm. “You think they’re being coerced somehow? Political or economic pressure, something like that?”

“Or they’re being lied to, maybe?” Shiro sighed heavily, slumping forward. “I don’t know. I don’t want to assume these people are our enemy only to find out they’re victims, too.”

There was something vulnerable in Shiro’s voice, and it pulled tight between his shoulders as the motion of Matt’s hand stilled. It struck Matt suddenly that it hadn’t been all that long since Shiro had been forced to fight against them. A month, maybe, and Shiro had spent most of the intervening time dealing with the UN, working out the treaty with New Altea, and otherwise taking on way too many roles for one person to handle.

Matt remembered that first day, when Shiro had felt an inch from falling apart. He remembered the guilt, and the fear. The way a nightmare woke him in the middle of the night, and he’d had to go assure himself the others were okay before he’d been able to relax back into sleep.

They hadn’t talked much about it since then. Returning to Earth had helped; having Akira around even more so. Shiro smiled more these days, and Akira had a knack for derailing Shiro’s downward spirals with a seemingly offhand comment.

That didn’t necessarily mean Shiro was healing from his recent trauma. It very well might mean he was just able to bury it deeper than he could have before.

Matt cocked his head to the side, taking in the lines of Shiro’s face. “More recon, you think?”

Shiro inhaled, the breath seeming to infuse him with new strength. He straightened, and Matt almost believed he’d found his footing again. “Yeah.” Shiro reached out for a cube on the table and tapped one side. A map of the city appeared in the air overhead. “Aransha and her people are nowhere near ready for an assault. Ryner suggested we take tomorrow to scout the city on foot. The Olkari will provide us with disguises, and Ryner can lead us around to points of interest.”

“Very well.” Allura folded her hands in her lap, looking thoughtful. “That seems reasonable. Find out who’s really behind the state of affairs in the city before we act.”

Her voice had the slightest edge to it, and Shiro flushed. “Am I that transparent?”

Leaning forward, Allura laid her hand atop Shiro’s. “To Matt and I? I suspect the only person you could possibly hide less from is Akira.”

“We’re all on the same page, Takashi,” Matt said, smiling at Allura. “We’re here to liberate Olkarion, not to punish the people who are just trying to survive.”

“I know.” Shiro ran a hand through his hair, his eyes staring at something unseen. “Just—this hits too close to home. I’m afraid I’m going to lose my objectivity.”

Allura’s brow furrowed. “You think you won’t be able to make the hard call if these Olkari turn out to truly be loyal to Zarkon?”

Shiro’s lips twitched, and he shook his head. “The hard call? Allura, you know what I was like in the Arena. You’ve seen what I did. Killing the enemy? That’s the easy choice. I’m afraid I might have made it too easy.”

“Shiro...”

He shook his head. “No. I’m not going to lie to myself. When you back me into a corner, I fight. That may not be who I wanted to be, but it’s who I’ve become.” He breathed out, meeting Allura’s gaze, and Matt felt like he was witnessing a clash of wills. “All I’m asking is that you stop me if I go too far.”

“I won’t have to,” she said, her jaw jutting stubbornly.

“Please, Allura. For my own peace of mind.”

She huffed, but her eyes burned with the same concern gnawing a hole in Matt’s stomach. This wasn’t a side of Shiro he’d seen often—insecure, haunted, _scared._ Maybe this had always been there, lurking below a thin veneer of confidence. Maybe it was just that Shiro had finally begun to allow his doubts to show—at least for the two of them.

He itched to soothe the doubts away, but he didn’t know how. He knew only a fraction of what Shiro had seen and done, what Haggar’s latest ploy had dragged back to the forefront of Shiro’s mind. She’d crafted him into a weapon—first through fear, then through outright control—and Matt could only imagine what that would do to a person’s self-image.

“You know we’d never let you cross that line,” Matt said, wrapping his fingers around Shiro’s wrist. “Allura is right; it’s not going to come to that, but _if_ it did, we’d say something.”

Shiro nodded, breathing out a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”

“Sure,” Matt said, wrapping his arms around Shiro’s shoulders. His eyes found Allura, who looked as troubled as Matt, though she offered a small smile. “You know we’re always here for you, Takashi. We always will be.”

“I know.” Shiro reached up, squeezing Matt’s wrist gently. “And I’ll get through this. I just… I haven’t been feeling like myself lately. I’m fine,” he hastened to add, cutting off Allura’s reply. “I’ll be fine. It’s just going to take a little more time.”

He smiled, translucent optimism covering over his pain, and Matt’s heart ached for him. Sighing, he leaned his head against Shiro’s scalp and hugged him tighter. “Take however long you need.”

* * *

Inanimasi was a city on a mind-boggling scale. Growing up, Ryner had seldom thought about the world beyond her circuit. The circuits all traded with each other, of course. They all obeyed laws set by King Lubos and the Capitol. There was travel between circuits, and some boasted attractions you couldn’t find elsewhere, like museums or theme parks or renowned gardens. But each circuit was designed to be self-contained and self-sufficient.

To a child, each circuit seemed as big as the world.

As Ryner grew, her horizons expanded. She traveled to other circuits on business or for pleasure. She used the network to meet friends and colleagues who lived still farther way—on the coast, or in the northern foothills—but she still had only the vaguest concept of anything outside South-Central Inanimasi.

She remembered fleeing to the forest in sharp clarity not only because it meant leaving behind everything she knew, but because it was only then that she fully appreciated the scale of her world. As she and the other rebels boarded a few stolen ships and rose into the air, the City spread out below them, glittering metal stretching out as far as the eye could see. Towers and pyramids rose in clusters at the hearts of the densest circuits, while low-lying residential blocks filled in between.

Ninety percent of the world’s population lived in the City—nearly four billion people, each of them just keeping their head down, making ends meet, trying to live their own life as Zarkon’s shadows fell over more and more of the city.

Ryner remembered being shocked by the size of the city, which was far larger than numbers on a page could convey—and she remembered rising above the peaks of the Spine and seeing Vivasi spread out below her, ten times as large as the City. An infinite expanse, it had seemed. An endless sea of green and blue, without a single transit line to make the vast distances less daunting.

The forest was the perfect place to disappear.

Now she stood again on the edge of the City, heart in her throat. This was a different kind of jungle, and it invited a different kind of stealth. In Vivasi, you could walk for weeks and not run into another Olkari. The rebel cells survived on the gamble that so long as they masked their electronic presence, Zarkon would never find their hidden camps.

In Inanimasi, there was no chance of avoiding watchful eyes, but you could hide in the chaos of billions of people going about their business. Let the enemy see you, but don’t let them realize your significance.

Aransha had continued to monitor the City in Ryner’s absence, though not much had changed since her departure. There was minimal travel off-planet, but a trickle of ships still visited the spaceports. Galra ships, mostly, along with a few approved traders. The transit system still worked, as well, which meant it probably wasn’t unusual to see strangers passing through your circuit.

Meri and Allura had adopted Olkari shifts for the reconnaissance mission, and there had been enough off-worlders living in the City when Zarkon invaded that Keith, Nyma, and Shay shouldn’t draw too much attention, so long as they wore the Olkari clothing Aransha had provided and didn’t make it obvious they were a group.

The humans were more distinctive, but hopefully not excessively so if they kept their hoods up and stayed out of trouble.

Capitol Circuit sat two districts in from the foothills, the massive ziggurat of Lubos’s palace visible even from this distance. That was their destination. Scans placed the highest concentration of Galra in the capitol, which was also the most influential and most densely populated circuit in the City. Whatever was happening on Olkarion, the people in Capitol Circuit would know what it was.

They had decided to travel in three smaller groups so as not to attract attention. Allura and Keith, with Matt and Shiro providing backup, were going to try to find a Galra command center to extract information from. Lance would lead the other Blues to a shopping district to talk with ordinary citizens.

And Ryner would lead Pidge, Hunk, and Shay to the lab where she herself had once worked.

She dreaded what she would find, whether too much changed from her memories, or not at all, but there was no use in delaying. She led her team into the border circuit, where they used forged transit passes Aransha had provided to board a transit headed for the capitol.

Pidge and Hunk kept their hoods up as they made their way into the city, passing streams of Olkari rushing to work, to the store, to school. Pidge stood out somewhat, as Olkari tended to be some inches taller than humans, and Pidge was shorter than most humans, anyway. Ryner stuck close to them, hoping that if no one looked too closely they would be taken as grandmother and grandchild.

They passed a single guard patrol on the short walk to the transit station, and the foot traffic was heavy enough that the patrol never even noticed the strangers.

Security at the transit station was somewhat more stringent, but they’d timed this infiltration for the morning rush, and Ryner hurried Pidge through with an apologetic smile for the attendant and a frantic look at the timetable. She glanced over her shoulder in time to see Hunk and Shay make it through the security checkpoint—though not without a few strange looks from the guards.

Just as well the other groups were headed for different stations. One human was a curiosity; a procession of them would certainly draw comment.

“That’s step one down,” Pidge muttered as all four of them settled in at a booth table inside the transit. “Now we just need everything else to go as smoothly.”

Hunk scoffed, rubbing his temples. “I could do without the snark, Pidge. This is gonna be stressful enough as it is.”

“You took an Ativan?”

Hunk pulled a small plastic bottle out of an inner pocket on his cloak and shook it. “Brought a couple extras, just in case.”

Pidge nodded. “See? You’ll be fine. Besides, it’s not like we drew the military police stick. We’re meeting with scholars! We’ll probably end up talking shop for three hours and almost missing the transit home.”

Shay laughed weakly, and Ryner forced a smile, though her attention kept straying to the view through her window. Sleek silver buildings raced by below them, blurring together into a swirl of sunlight and shadow. Long-distance lines like this afforded passengers a little more in the way of comfort than local routes; it could take hours to cross from one side of the city to the other. The capitol was only a half hour’s ride on the express line, and Ryner led them off at the fifth local stop, which put them out in the university district.

“This way,” she said. “And keep your heads down.”

Pidge followed Ryner’s directions for all of thirty seconds before their head began to swivel, eyes seeking out every library, lab, and lecture hall around. “Ryner, were you a professor?”

Ryner pursed her lips. “Yes, though I was more interested in my research than my classes. Easier to get funding if you’re doing the university a favor.”

“What was your area? Botany? Agriculture? Medicine?”

“Weapons development,” Ryner said shortly. She was aware of the sudden silence behind her, but she didn’t slow her pace. She’d done a lot of things in her time she’d since come to regret. The weapons she’d designed, she’d meant to defend her people from the attack they all knew was coming. Other engineers, particularly in the Defense field, had been a kind of revolutionary sect. Many of them had come with Ryner to the forest when she fled. Many more had died in the early days of the war.

Ryner only hoped some of the good ones were still here, and that Zarkon hadn’t replaced the entire staff with his own loyal goons.

Students streamed across campus as Ryner walked familiar paths to the lab where she’d once had an office. It was still early morning, so there weren’t a lot of lectures going, but the university was as busy as it ever was, and the sea of students provided the perfect cover to slip inside the research facility. Once the door closed behind them, they were left in eerie silence. The overhead lights seemed dim after the rising sun, and Ryner paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust.

“Quietly now,” Ryner said, waving her companions forward. “And be ready to hide. It will be difficult to explain our presence here if the wrong person finds us.”

The others nodded each in turn, and they fell into line, Pidge monitoring BLIP-tech scans on their gauntlet, Shay trailing her hands along the wall. It wasn’t exactly the caverns of a Balmera, but Olkari architects infused their buildings with streams of Quintessence. Ryner wasn’t certain how much an outsider could glean from the flows, but any extra warnings would be more than welcome.

Pidge hissed out, and Ryner tensed—but it was too late to run. A door opened ahead, and Ryner found herself face-to-face with a golden-skinned Olkari woman with blue eyes blown wide with surprise. She wore the white robes of a researcher, the gold pin at her shoulder celebrating her tenure.

Ain-wa. The other woman was twenty years Ryner’s junior, and they’d never been particularly close. Ain-wa worked on energy cores, and she’d always been somewhat condescending of those who worked on more “short-sighted” projects of “limited scope.”

Ryner reached into her cloak for her gauntlet and pistol, ready to deal with this obstacle, but Ain-wa only took a step back, her jaw dropping.

“Ryner?” she hissed. “What--?” She stopped herself, looking frantically around the hallway before grabbing Ryner by the wrist and dragging her into the cluttered office. There was a connected laboratory, and Ain-wa sprinted for the door, darkening the window panel before spinning and waving frantically to the other paladins. “In!” she snapped. “Before they see you!”

“They?” Pidge asked, squawking as Hunk pushed them forward. Shay closed the door behind them all, and Ain-wa darkened that window, as well—though not without one last glance outside. “Who’s they?”

“The watchers,” Ain-wa said. “The prophets of the Cult of Lubos.”


	10. The Cult of Lubos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Pidge and Ryner arrived on Olkarion and did some reconnaissance. They expected to find military rule and the Olkari people enslaved, but instead the planet seems to have remained largely independent, and what martial presence there is is mostly made up of Olkari guard patrols. They regrouped with the other paladins, and Pidge had a conversation with Keith about autism. Then the whole team headed back to Inanimasi, the megacity that houses 90% of the world's population. Ryner, Pidge, Hunk, and Shay headed to the university where Ryner once worked, where an old colleague warned them about the watching eyes of the Cult of Lubos.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for pervasive hallucinations, dissociation, and (non-graphic) medical horror throughout Rolo's scenes. Also a brief instance of deadnaming because Sam doesn't know Pidge goes by a different name now. Technically happens off-screen, but is referenced in the first scene.

“Quintessence levels stable.”

“Subject is responding well to our augmentations.”

Rolo choked on a laugh that the druids neither acknowledged nor responded to. Their faces, covered by blank white masks, flashed in and out of his line of sight as they flitted about the room. He’d been in the lab for several hours already today, his head drifting on currents of a sedative. Bursts of pain and garbled voices disturbed what couldn’t properly be called sleep, and in between he dreamed.

_Hey. Fuzzhead._

It was Nyma’s voice, close enough beside him he almost believed they’d taken her too, though he knew they couldn’t have. She was a survivor. She fought hard, and she fought dirty, and Rolo would give his shitty replacement prosthetic to see the Galra _try_ to bring her in.

 _Shitty’s right,_ the voice said. _But you need to hold onto that piece of junk until you get a chance to fix it. You can learn to walk on that if you have to, and you need to be able to walk if you’re going to make it out of here._

Rolo smiled at that, a feeble twitch of his lips that nevertheless gave pause to the druid leaning over him, pressing a scanner to the side of his head to--

 _Don’t think about them, Rolo,_ Nyma whispered.

Right. Rolo closed his eyes and focused on Nyma’s voice. He wasn’t in a laboratory, where they pumped him full of synthetic Quintessence and ticked boxes on their datapads as the world around him shivered and split apart. He was with Sam, who massaged Rolo’s aching leg as he told stories about his children.

_Matt. Katie._

Maybe the Matt Rolo knew. Maybe not. Sam didn’t mention Pidge by name—though Rolo supposed they might have gone by a different name the last time they’d all been together. How long had it been by now? Sam had lost track, but he’d guessed two years.

A lot could happen in two years.

Rolo hadn’t dared to ask. Sam swore there were no cameras or microphones in the cells—and, true, Rolo had never seen anything electronic past the outer doors—but neither of them trusted the druids for an instant, and if Zarkon somehow didn’t already know that Sam was father to two of the paladins, if in fact he was, then Rolo wasn’t going to give up that information.

Sam could tell there was something Rolo wasn’t saying; Rolo saw that much in the pinch of Sam’s brow whenever the subject came up, in the way his hands grasped at empty air, like he had to physically hold himself back from pressing for details.

What did he think? That Matt might have escaped, that Rolo had come across him in his travels? That Matt had been there the day Rolo was taken, and was now dead or worse? Pidge wouldn’t even factor into Sam’s imagined scenario—why should they? From what little Rolo knew of the situation, Pidge had come looking after their family was taken. For all Sam knew, his younger child was still safe back home on Earth.

Safe. Ha.

Something pricked Rolo’s arm and he hissed, the pain dragging him bodily back into the present. He opened his eyes just a sliver and saw the golden glow of synthetic Quintessence dripping into his veins.

“Begin phase two.”

Rolo’s heart beat faster, his breath spooling in his chest. An unseen machine whirred to life nearby, the sound grating on Rolo’s ears. He’d been hearing whispers of phase two for days now, and it twisted him up inside. Sam had been through phase two already and kept repeating that he would survive it, he could endure it, he was stronger than what they had in store.

It didn’t help.

 _Don’t think about that,_ Nyma said. Rolo could almost imagine the restraints around his wrists were her hands, squeezing gently, not holding him captive. _Don’t think about it. Think about us. Think about the_ Harbinger.

 _The_ Harbinger _?_ Rolo thought, tensing all over as the table he was strapped to began to recline.

Nyma’s voice brightened, seeping into the hum of the machine. _Yeah. Think of better times. Think of anything but this._

The air around him changed, and Rolo sensed he was in an enclosed space now, the whirring all around him. Bright lights flashed beyond his eyelids, staining his vision with the color of blood. Slow and strobing, it lulled him, pulled him out of his body.

Rolo went willingly. The table beneath him tilted, sliding upright; the close space became a cockpit; the light a passing star that flashed past the edge of the viewscreen.

Nyma laughed, the sound bright and cheerful; the tinkle of voices danced on the edge of his awareness. Beezer buzzed, and though he sounded somehow off, Rolo turned his mind away from the dissonance. He was home. He was _here,_ and all the rest was just a bad dream.

“Sleeping on the job, huh?” Nyma asked, kicking her feet up on the console. “And you call me a bad influence.”

Beezer’s whistle said that this _was_ Nyma’s bad influence, that Rolo had never slept behind the wheel before.

She scoffed, thumping him on the top of his casing. Her head lolled back, and she flashed Rolo a cheery grin. “Have a good nap, there, fluffball?”

Rolo rolled his head, massaging an ache that had settled into his neck at the base of his skull. “Nah. Shitty dreams.” His ears rang for a moment, a whine on the edge of hearing setting his teeth on edge. But when he turned, Nyma was smirking at him, and he covered her face with his palm before she could say something smart. “Shut your mouth, sunshine. What’s on the docket for today?”

Nyma brushed his hand aside with a laugh. “Oh, you know. Theft, sabotage, general trickery. The usual.”

“Right.” Something tickled at the corner of Rolo’s mind. Something he was forgetting… Something that howled inside him like the void of space… He smiled for Nyma as another star flashed past the viewscreen. “Then let’s get to it.”

* * *

The Cult of Lubos.

Ryner’s skin tingled with the implications of that. Lubos was her king, the legal and moral head of all Olkarion—but not a god. Not a religious figure in any sense. There had always been a clear delineation between law and spirituality, and King Lubos was very conscientious about overstepping his bounds.

Ain-wa watched Ryner with something between awe and terror, her hands curling around the collar of her coat. Her antennae quivered, her eyes darting to the door that led to the hallway. “You… you didn’t know?”

“About a _cult_?” Ryner asked. “Of course not! Lubos.”

Ain-wa flinched, her shoulders folding inward. “Shh! Someone will hear you!”

Frowning, Pidge edged closer to Ryner. “Who’s this Lubos person?”

“Our king,” said Ryner, numb.

“And… he employs prophets?” Shay asked.

“No. No, he’s…” Ryner faltered, turning back to Ain-wa. “Explain. What is this cult all about?”

Ain-wa held up shaking hands, stuttering through a few aborted attempts at explanation before she collapsed into the chair behind her desk. “Oh, Lubos. Oh, mercy.”

“Ain-wa, please.” Ryner raised her hands, straining for calm as the other woman continued to mutter. “We need information. Tell us about the Cult of Lubos and we’ll be on our way.”

Ain-wa’s mouth snapped shut, and she stared at Ryner for a long moment before drawing in a deep breath to steady herself. “The Cult of Lubos runs the City. When the Galra took over, they allowed King Lubos to remain as our cultural leader. Some people took it too far—started calling him the descendant of gods. His prophets proclaim his will throughout the City, and we comply. If you exemplify his ideals—if you create something worthy of Lubos himself—you are rewarded. If you defy him...” She swallowed, burying her head in her hands. “If you defy him, the prophets will deal with you directly, never mind the Galra courts.”

“So, what?” Hunk asked. “He just wants you to make stuff? Like… birdhouses? Sweaters?”

Cringing, Ain-wa stared at her hands. “Well…”

Ryner waited for her to go on, and when she didn’t, Ryner strode forward, grasping the arms of Ain-wa’s chair and leaning down so their eyes met. “What does Lubos demand of you? Is he...” The words stuck in Ryner’s throat, and she closed her eyes. She didn’t want to allow for this possibility, but she had to know. “Is he working with the Galra?”

“Yes.”

Ain-wa might as well have punched Ryner in the gut. The breath left her in a rush, and her head fell forward, spinning. King Lubos was… No. Lubos would never betray his people like that. More likely, he’d been executed, and the Galra continued to use his name to trick the Olkari people into cooperating.

“Lubos,” Ryner hissed, part name, part curse. Schooling her features, she searching Ain-wa’s face. “What does he have you make? Weapons? Ships?”

Ain-wa nodded frantically. “Yes. Yes, all that and more. Shields, scanners, comms. The Cult is running a competition now to find new alternatives to Quintessence for deep space voyages.” She swallowed, seeming for the first time to realize that her visitors wore armor beneath their disguises. Her skin, already a waxen yellow-green, paled. “They all claim discoveries made in Lubos’s name are sacred, that the Galra never see those blueprints, but we’re not stupid. Our research goes to feed Zarkon’s conquest. But what can we do? If you refuse to innovate, you disappear—I’ve seen it happen.”

Even without turning, Ryner sensed the pointed look that passed from Pidge to Hunk. The Empire maintained its rule, in part, because of its superior tech. Tech it appeared may have come from Ryner's own people. She wondered if the others blamed the Olkari for that. Part of Ryner wanted to—after everything she and her fellow rebels had sacrificed to the fight against the Galra. After all the death, all that Olkari pride that had refused to bow to the Empire for ten thousand years, and now they offered Olkari tech to Zarkon on bended knee?

Yet Ryner could see the fear as plain as the Quintessence that ran through her planet. The Cult of Lubos might tempt her people with promises of wealth and fame, but Olkarion was enslaved as surely as any labor colony within the Empire’s bounds.

 _They will fight back,_ Ryner told herself. _If they see a chance, if we give them reason to believe the Galra can be driven out, many of these people will stand with us._

Of course, the Cult still posed a problem. Before the paladins could make their move, they would need to learn more: how many Olkari followed the Cult doctrine, and how many were truly loyal? What weapons did they have, and how closely did they watch the citizens of Inanimasi? Would cultists fight alongside the Galra if battle broke out—and would the Galra support the cult if the people revolted?

One thing was clear: Ain-wa didn’t have the information Ryner needed. She had to go straight to the source.

“Where does the Cult of Lubos meet?”

* * *

“Tonight?” Shiro ran a hand down his face, looking to Allura to gauge her thoughts. It was mid-afternoon now, and the paladins had gathered in a small cave outside the City to debrief before they returned to Ryner’s cell. The mission to the Galra command center had gone smoothly, but ultimately turned up very little, as the two Galra guard posts they’d been able to infiltrate had contained very little besides patrol records for the city. Good to know, but not especially helpful.

The Blues’ trip to a shopping center had been similarly uneventful. Shiro hadn’t heard the details yet, but he gathered it had turned up a great deal about the populace’s disposition--generally content with flashes of fear whenever Galra sentries or Olkari police passed by.

The one thing Shiro hadn’t been expecting Ryner’s team to turn up with was reports of a cult that turned the Olkari king into a puppet of the Galra Empire.

Where most of the other paladins had taken seats on whatever rocks and fallen logs were available, Ryner remained standing, her hands loose at her side, her chin angled up ever so slightly. Hers was an understated aura of command, built upon her poise and wisdom. She didn’t issue orders, but she let her thoughts be known, and not even Shiro was immune to her power of sheer reason.

“I was unable to discover many details about the meeting,” Ryner said, her gaze steady. “But I know of the park where it is to take place, and I know that all gatherings of the cult are open to the public.”

“And you wish to attend,” Allura said.

Ryner nodded. “I don’t trust information we might gain second-hand. Those who oppose the cult on principle will not have the kind of experience with it we need. Those who are intimately acquainted with the cult’s inner workings may well be our enemies.”

“And those who joined the cult but left once they realized what Lubos was really up to?” Shiro asked.

Ryner’s eyes closed briefly, pain making her antennae wilt. The expression was gone as quickly as it had appeared, and she shook her head. “I fear it would take too long to find any. Ain-wa says those who defy the prophets are made to disappear, and I suspect that includes those who try to leave the cult.”

A profoundly reasonable argument for infiltrating one of these gatherings, but Shiro still didn’t like it. Whoever went would be putting themself in tremendous danger—and they would be going in with very little information.

Allura lifted her hand to her mouth and bit at a thumbnail, only to catch herself a moment later and deliberately clasp her hands at her waist. “We would have to go in quiet. Lie low—it would be unwise to send an offworlder. Meri and I could disguise ourselves again, but the rest of you...”

“I’m afraid even that is too risky,” Ryner said. “It sounds as though the cult is an enormous charade designed to tempt my people into producing new technology for the Empire. I don’t know what happens at these meetings, but there is a very real chance we will be asked to use the Olkari arts. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I do not believe your shape-shifting abilities allow you to replicate talents.”

Allura pursed her lips. “No, you’re right.”

“So, what?” Shiro asked. “You intend to go alone? Ryner--”

She held up a hand, smiling faintly. “I don’t trust these people any more than you do, Shiro. If I go, I’ll ask for volunteers from my cell. We should have just enough time to get back, explain the situation, and return to the City.”

Shiro glanced at Allura, who seemed on the verge of agreeing. Shiro’s own concern was reflected back at him in her eyes, however. There was a lot to be learned from observing a cult gathering—and Voltron was sorely in need of information.

That didn’t mean he liked this idea.

Rubbing his jaw, Shiro looked out over the other paladins. Most of them had lost interest in the hushed conversation happening between Ryner and the black paladins, and they had devolved into their own conversations. Val and Meri were reenacting a conversation from the marketplace; Hunk, Pidge, and Matt were already compiling the data from the security checkpoint with the scans Pidge and Ryner had taken the previous day.

Lance sat at the edge of the group, occasionally adding commentary to Val and Meri’s reenactment. But every few seconds he glanced at Shiro, curiosity and concern evident in his face.

“All right,” Shiro said at length, turning back to Ryner. “You know Olkarion better than any of us. It only makes sense to listen to your instincts. Put together your team and let us know when you’re headed out. The rest of us will put our heads together and try to come up with some next steps.”

Ryner’s answering smile was understated, but there was no mistaking her satisfaction. This was, after all, her home. It hadn’t been so very long since Shiro had returned to Earth, a fire burning just beneath his skin telling him to do whatever it took to keep his home out of Galra hands. How much more would it have grated at him to find out that humanity had already surrendered to Zarkon’s forces?

He just hoped whatever she learned tonight would be enough to give them the upper hand.

* * *

Rolo, Nyma, and Beezer flew for hours, the silence that settled around them comfortable for its familiarity. Rolo dozed several times, but dark dreams always startled him awake. Nyma seemed not to notice, and Beezer only chattered coordinates and system reports that entered Rolo's ears as white noise.

They had no destination in mind, and something about that made Rolo's chest tight with the shadow of oncoming panic. When he pressed Nyma, though, she only told him to relax and to try to get some sleep. They passed stars and planets Rolo remembered from distant memories, stars that should have been much farther apart than they seemed to his addled senses.

When they stopped, it was the last place in the universe Rolo expected to find himself. He checked and re-checked the coordinates, then stared at the stretch of empty space before them, waiting for an Imperial patrol to drop out of a wormhole and shoot them out of the sky.

The sky remained empty. No stars or ships or planets for light-years; just the _Harbinger_ and her crew and the hazy dreams that plagued Rolo's sleep.

"Is this...?"

Nyma breathed in, a smile softening her face. "The edge of Imperial territory," she said. "If we keep going, we'll officially be out from under Zarkon's thumb."

 _Freedom._ It pulled at Rolo in a way it never had before. Sure, he'd had chances to get out. To leave the war behind, to find some quiet system out of comms range of Zarkon's empire where the atrocities of the Galra weren't even a whisper on the wind. It was technically illegal to leave the Empire, but Zarkon didn't have the manpower to secure his borders. If Rolo and Nyma had really wanted to go, they could have gone at any time.

Rolo had never wanted to go before. He did now.

Beezer asked what the hold-up was. There was nothing tying them down, after all, was there?

But Rolo hesitated. "There's nothing out there," he murmured.

Nyma snorted. "Of course there is. Don't be stupid, Rolo. Zarkon's an ancient imperialistic dictator, but he doesn't own the entire universe."

"No." Rolo lifted his hands off the controls, his leg aching suddenly. "If we go out there, I won't be coming back."

Beezer tutted. Wasn't that the point?

Wasn't it? Rolo couldn't remember. He couldn't remember the thought process that had brought him here, or why he'd never taken the out before. He reached out again, sweaty palms slipping on the yoke as he eased them forward. He felt every tick like a hook embedded in his flesh, dragging him back toward everything he didn't want to think about.

Why did it hurt so much? What was holding him back?

All at once, Rolo came back to himself. Back to the lab on the cold, quiet hunk of rock on the edge of nowhere where the druids were methodically ripping him apart. Every inch of him burst alight with renewed pain, and he doubled over, gasping as the agony threatened to sweep him away. It was only when a warm hand cupped the back of his neck and another appeared on his arm, rubbing small circles, that Rolo realized he wasn't strapped to the table any longer.

"Easy now," Sam murmured. "It'll pass, son. Just breathe through it."

"Where--?" Rolo cut off as the pain crested, and Sam crouched down, pulling Rolo against him. "Where am I?"

"Back. Mostly."

Rolo went cold. "Mostly?"

"Stage two was a success," Sam explained. "They've separated your consciousness from your body." He paused. "It gets easier."

Rolo pulled back, squinting against light that seem impossibly bright. He was, in fact, in the laboratory, druids rushing all around. None of them seemed to notice Rolo and Sam huddled on the floor in the center of the room.

It took only a moment to notice himself lying inside a machine that looked something like a cryopod, but with strange, glowing protrusions around the case at the level of Rolo's head.

"You'll find your way back soon enough," Sam explained. "They'll take some measurements, then toss you back in the cell and do it again in a few days. Enough repetitions, and you'll start to be able to drift without the machines." He paused, hand stilling as he stared at Rolo's body. After a moment, he turned, catching Rolo's eyes. "Of course, that's assuming you decide to stay."

"I get a choice?"

"Of course you do." Sam's face fell as the druids connected a canister of liquid Quintessence to the pod. "You could go. Let your mind drift. They don't know where your mind is right now, and they can't force it back into your body. If you go, your body will wither, and you'll eventually die. I've seen it happen before, to the other prisoners they brought here. It might be better than enduring the rest of their experiments."

Watching the Quintessence drain into his body, Rolo felt a shiver. Maybe it was all in his head, but he could almost feel the needle they'd stuck in his arm, and the odd heat that spread up his veins. He screwed his eyes shut, and for just an instant he was back in the _Harbinger_ , Nyma and Beezer bickering about music choices as the ship drifted closer to the empty expanse ahead.

He could go. Just close his eyes and vanish beyond Zarkon's reach. It would be so easy...

But Sam's hand was warm on his neck, his voice an elegy that bolstered him, even as it mourned the lives they'd both lost. Sam's presence was fading now, and the fire in Rolo's veins tried to drag him back to his body. The moment of truth was fast approaching, but still Rolo kept his eyes shut, clinging to this final glimpse of freedom. He strode across the cockpit of the _Harbinger_ , resting his hand on Beezer's head.

Nyma fell silent at his approach, her smile turning quizzical. "You okay, fuzzbrain?"

"Fine," Rolo said. He squeezed her shoulder, bent down and kissed the top of her head. "Go find your freedom, Nyma. Don't waste this chance for my sake."

He turned as she spluttered a protest, the cockpit dissolving around him, and strode back into hell.

* * *

The all-Voltron team brainstorming session wasn’t quite the resounding success Lance had been anticipating. After Ryner left—together with Zori and Joska, two guards from the rebel cell—things quickly began to stagnate. Their plan, such as it was, basically amounted to _rally the rebels in the forest, see if there’s opposition left in the city, unite them all to kick out the Galra and, oh, probably do something about the Cult of Lubos while we’re at it._

They needed more information about the City before they made any specific plans on that end, so most of their projects for tonight were laying the groundwork. Aransha, the cell’s Elder, had apparently been the main point of contact with forest Olkari—Vivaskari—for years; she and Shiro were going to try to get in touch with them. Most everyone else was helping the rebel cell prepare, whether by making weapons, running drills, or simply talking with the Olkari about what the City was like.

Lance, profoundly bored with the mundane preparations after about ten minutes, had volunteered to run Pidge and Allura back to the castle-ship. Allura thought it best to have the castle nearby when they launched their attack, and Pidge was relatively confident they could find somewhere in the system that was hidden from the Empire’s scanners.

“You that bored with everything, too?” Lance asked Allura. They stood together at the edge of the castle's bridge, hanging around like a couple of pretty decorations while Pidge, Coran, and Zelka conferred on the best ways to lie low.

Allura opened her mouth, only to have her protest die on her tongue. She eyed Coran as he danced over to the stellar map and called up a set of coordinates, rambling about sklekorgian clouds and the limitations of ivovatronic pickups.

“I suppose I am redundant to this particular conversation,” Allura said begrudgingly.

Lance grinned. “But, hey, coming up here is still better than sitting around down on Olkarion reinventing fire while the Olkari have already moved on to nuclear power.”

Brow furrowing, Allura watched him for a long moment, perhaps debating whether or not it was worth asking what Lance was talking about. Eventually, she shook her head. “Actually, there’s something I wanted to check in the castle’s records.”

“Oh?”

Allura’s gaze slide away. “Just… something I remember the last generation of paladins discussing.”

“About Olkarion?”

“Not specifically,” Allura admitted. “It’s probably nothing. I just wanted to be sure.”

Lance nodded. “Makes sense.” He paused, then stretched his hands over his head. “Anyway, I have no doubt these nerds will be up all night working on this pet project of theirs, so if you don’t mind, I’m gonna go change into something more comfortable. Catch you around?”

“Sure.” Allura blinked, then finally seemed to process Lance’s words. She turned to him and smiled. “Of course. I’ll see you at dinner—though I suspect we might be a few bodies short.”

Lance laughed, and sure enough, when he called a farewell to Pidge and Coran, neither seemed to hear him.

* * *

The Cult of Lubos had taken over the Capitol Circuit Park, shadowed figures spilling over into the streets, some shrouded in voluminous cloaks, some obviously drunk. Ryner suppressed her disgust and led the way into the gathering, Zori and Joska pressing in close beside her.

She’d been past this park several times when she lived in the City, but she’d never actually ventured inside. Olkari sensibility said that one could not live without nature in their life. The Olkari owed their life to Sia, the Mother Forest; much of what they knew they had learned from living in Vivasi, and the fact that they had since moved on to metal and computers was no reason for them to turn their back on the world that had given them everything. Each circuit, therefore, had a central garden or park—and often several others. Many people grew gardens in their private yard or tended plants indoors, on rooftops, or in window boxes.

Ryner had vehemently rejected all of that. She hated greenery with a passion, and she did all she could to avoid it.

Or... she  _had_ , until she’d been forced across the Spine.

Still, Ryner’s heart ached to see the changes the cult had wrought on the park. Flower beds had been trampled in the passing of the crowd, trees cut down, hedges shredded and left strewn about the grounds. The fountain that had once flowed at the heart of the park now ran dry, a layer of moss dappling the basin. Several Olkari in silver robes stood on the rim of the fountain, elaborate headdresses perched precariously atop their heads.

“Those must be the prophets,” Joska murmured. She’d drawn her cloak close around her shoulders, and she kept glancing over her shoulder and eyeing the other attendees with distrust. Each of them wore an amplifier on their wrists—a smaller, more compact design than the usual gauntlets. At a glance, they would be taken for simple ornamentation—but not when they were glowing brilliant green, as Joska's was now.

Ryner closed her hand around Joska’s wrist, dampening the light. “Remember why we came.”

Joska closed her eyes, breathing deeply. Her antennae shivered with suppressed emotion, but she managed to hold it together, and slowly the glow in her amplifier subsided. Ryner nodded.

Zori watched the exchange silently, his hand tapping restlessly against his thigh. “So… what do we do now? Mingle? Talk to the prophets?”

Ryner took in the gathering at a glance. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected—a religious ceremony, perhaps? A lecture?

Whatever she’d been expecting, she didn’t find it. True, there were prophets scattered her and there, giving speeches to small circles of cultists. But elsewhere people were crafting curiosities out of scrap metal. Prophets wandered among these circles, observing the displays. Most of the creators seemed oblivious to the attention, but a few sent sneaky glances toward prophets who had turned their attention elsewhere.

Trying to impress the leaders, perhaps?

The listeners and the creators only made up about half of the group in attendance tonight. By far the largest group was congregated around the row of hovering tables that held food and drink. From the loud voices, overbearing laughter, and exaggerated gestures coming from the area, the spirits were flowing freely tonight.

“Spread out,” Ryner said, “but maintain visual contact. Learn whatever you can without drawing undo attention.”

Zori and Joska nodded, splitting off from Ryner and milling about the gathering. Zori went straight for the liquor, of course, while Joska inched closer to the curiosities being produced by the creators. Ryner eyed both groups, then struck out toward the fountain. As she approached, she began to pick out threads of several different conversations. 

The prophet on the left was outlining the foundations of the Olkari art. But these were not the tenants Ryner had learned as a student. This was not the clear, practical instructions that explained how the flow of Quintessence at a subatomic level could reshape the physical world. Nor was it the teachings of the Vivaskari—what few Ryner had had the privilege of hearing. The Vivaskari art was grounded in intuition, in understanding the natural world and working with the tree to create something new, in much the same way a sculptor might learn to feel the grain of the wood or where a block of stone might fracture.

Both arts were still firmly grounded in reality—in science, in fact, in quantifiable aspects of the medium you wanted to shape. This prophet had taken those fundamentals and run off into the land of mysticism.

“Feel the spirit of the metal. Listen to what it says. Within each tree, each stone, each ingot is the soul of something magnificent! A tool, a computer, a beautiful work of art. But you must find the souls that are a match to you own. Would you bring a torn coat to an officer and ask him to mend it? Would you give a baker a sack of iron shavings and ask her to turn it into a cake? Of course not! Nor should you stray from the station Lubos has appointed you to, or waste your Quintessence on the first hunk of metal you lay eye on. Patience and self-reflection are the keys to a happy life.”

The prophet’s lecture never broke pace, but at the mention of Lubos’s name, he made a curious gesture, his antennae drooping low as he touched his fingers to his chin. Those listening to him mimicked the gesture, though they bowed their heads fully in a display that went beyond mere respect.

Ryner’s stomach churned, and she turned away from this prophet as he began to speak about how to sort the mundane from the outstanding and how one could prove oneself worthy of joining the upper echelons if they connected with a glorious soul and produced something that impressed Lubos. (Something that impressed the Galra, more like.)

The other prophets took different tacks, but their message was the same: life was a competition. Those who played this game, and played it well, would find themselves rewarded. Notably, the prophets remained vague about what, exactly, the ultimate reward was, whether financial gain, political stature, a spiritual boon, or something else entirely.

It didn’t matter. The Olkari in attendance tonight drank it all up, wide-eyed with ambition and hunger.

The Cult of Lubos was a brilliant ploy on the part of the Galra invaders. It pained Ryner to admit that, but she could see the sound tactics behind this decision. Her people had always been ambitious. When they lived in the forest, harvesting food that grew wild and sleeping beneath the stars, they had not been content with what they saw before them. They altered the landscape, modified the plants at the most fundamental level. Then they turned their eyes to the barren Deadlands, and they built the City, a marvel of civil engineering.

And still they reached, never content with what they had, always straining for the next great discovery. Every Olkari wanted to make a name for themself, to leave a legacy when their time on this world came to an end.

The Cult answered that hunger, directed it. And it used the name of Lubos to soothe away whatever reservations the people might have had if the Galra themselves had presented them with this call to glory.

A hand came down on Ryner’s shoulder and she turned, heart hammering in her throat. A prophet stood behind her, robes shimmering with metallic threads that caught the light of a bonfire someone had started in the middle of the green.

“What’s the matter?” the prophet asked, her golden eyes narrowing as she smiled a predatory smile. “Not enjoying the festivities?”

"I--"

The prophet silenced her with a finger pressed to her lips. "No, don't answer that." She turned, hand coming to rest between Ryner's shoulders. "Come. Walk with me."

* * *

“When do you think you’ll be making your move?” Lana asked distractedly. She had a dismantled cleaning bot spread out on the kitchen counter before her and was turning over its power supply, brow furrowed in concentration.

Lance leaned back on his stool, elbows propped up on the edge of the counter behind him, and watched her work. “It’ll probably be another day or so before we do anything,” he said. “And even that’s most likely going to end up being more reconnaissance work. We really don’t know a whole lot about the situation down there, and none of us wants to go into this underprepared.”

Lance’s mother nodded. She and Akani had taken over the kitchen sometime after the paladins headed out, and Lance was starting to think they hadn’t left since.

It was clear to see where Hunk got his habit of cooking when he was stressed—Akani had raided the pantry and set to baking. Lance counted two cakes, several dozen pastries, a neon-colored pie that had landed straight in the garbage bin, and no fewer than four different kinds of cookies. At the moment, Lance’s mom was chipping away at the mountain of dishes, ignoring the castle’s automatic dishwasher in favor of hand washing—probably as a way to pass the time without fretting over Lance and the others.

“Don’t worry,” Lance said, shaking off the tension filling the room and flashing a smile. “By the time we make our move, we’re going to have half the planet behind us—and most of the rest are just going to be trying to stay out of the way. Taking back Olkarion is gonna be a piece of cake.”

“Mmm.”

Lance arched an eyebrow at Zuza, who had one canine poking out over the back of a fork. She grinned, pulled the fork free, and stabbed it back into the slice of cake sitting before her.

“Cake,” she explained. “Never had it before.”

Lance laughed, glancing over at Akani, who was preening as she pulled the latest batch of cookies out of the oven. He had to admit, he’d been surprised to find Zuza camped out in the kitchen with the resident moms—even more so, he’d been surprised to see all three of them doting on her. She’d acted as Akani’s taste tester and assistant dishwasher for Lance’s mom, and in between she did her best to explain to Lana how Altean tech worked.

She probably wasn’t the _best_ source of information, but Lana certainly wasn’t complaining.

Zuza finished off the last of the cake with an appreciative rumble, and Lance’s mom stole the plate away before Zuza could wash it herself. Zuza scowled, but it didn’t last long as Akani turned her way.

“That was amazing, Mrs. Kahale,” she said. “New favorite food, hands down.”

Akani laughed, a blush gracing her cheeks, and bustled over to the stove, where she had a saucepan simmering. Hunk swore by his mama’s hot cocoa recipe—not that either of them was about to share the secret anytime soon. Akani had shielded the stove with her body while she added ingredients, and the only one Lance had been able to spot as she put them away was the milk.

Zuza eyed the spread of baked goods lined up along the counter opposite the one Lana had claimed as a work bench, fidgeting in her seat like she might pounce at any moment. It was good seeing her so animated again. She’d been oddly withdrawn since leaving New Altea, maybe because Azra, her adopted sister, had stayed behind with several of the other youngest refugees. Lance could sympathize; he’d spent much of the trip to Olkarion calling his family on New Altea just to hear their voices. Now that things were moving again and he couldn’t spend all day on space Skype, he felt their absence more keenly than ever.

“So I’ve never asked,” Lance said, catching Zuza’s eye. “What do you do when you’re not reading restricted histories and telling us how to exploit weaknesses Zarkon’s tried to bury?”

Zuza blinked a few times, then cocked her head to the side. “Me? I dunno. Read other stuff, I guess.”

“You guess?” Lance scoffed. “Come on. I’m serious! I want to know!”

Zuza’s furless ears were considerably smaller than Keith’s, so when they angled back it was a much subtler display, but there was no mistaking the purplish blush that crept into her furless cheeks. “No,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know. Never really had a lot of time for hobbies. Spent most of my time on Revinor looking after the kids and trying not to make the guards mad. Then when we came here I still had to take care of Azra, so really the only thing I’ve done for fun is poke around in the archives.”

Lance leaned forward, elbows coming to rest on his knees. “What about before all this? When you were a kid?”

She spread her arms. “I grew up in the army, Lance, same as Keith. There’s… there’s not exactly a lot of fun to be had on military vessels. You have lessons, you learn to fight… I don’t know if it was the same for Keith, but there weren’t exactly a lot of kids around. Only the officers brought their families on board, and most of _those_ kids only ever wanted to practice dueling.”

“No.” Lance’s mother pressed a sudsy hand to her chest, the dishes momentarily forgotten. She gaped at Zuza, eyes wide. A glance at Lana and Akani showed similarly horrified expressions, which made Zuza sink down in her seat. Noticing the damp spot on her shirt, Lance’s mom hastily dried her hands on a towel and came around the counter to take Zuza’s face in her hands. “You poor thing. And your parents let this happen?”

“My parents died in the war,” Zuza said. “I was raised by my uncle—and if he’d had his way, I’d have enlisted when I was three.”

Lance watched the rage flash across his mother’s face, gathering in her pursed lips and her shaking hands. She locked eyes with Lance, and if she hadn’t been totally sold on the paladins’ fight before, she was now. She hesitated for only a moment before pulling Zuza into a hug. “Well,” she said. “Your uncle sounds like a real bastard.”

Lance choked, doubling over as Lana reached over to pat his back. “Mamá! Did you just--?”

She grinned savagely, looping an arm around Zuza’s shoulders. “Yes, I did. That man deserves it, pressuring a child to fight.”

“I mean I’m not arguing, but...” Lance held up his hands. “You know what? No. You were best friends with an alien before I knew how to tie my shoes. A little profanity is nothing.”

Lana chuckled, tossing a metal coil back into the pile before her. “Careful there, Rosa. They’re catching on. Before you know it, our boys are going to realize we’re still trying to figure it out as much as anyone.”

Lance stuck his tongue out, then turned back to Zuza. “ _Anyway,_ you should think about what sorts of things you want to learn how to do, and we can give them a try after we’re done here.”

Zuza perked up. “You want to hang out?”

“Sure. You’re part of this team, aren’t you?”

Zuza smiled. “I guess I am.” She punched him in the arm, hard enough to bruise, and laughed when he winced. “It’s a date. Speaking of which—you should invite K-man, too. I’ll bet he’s got even fewer hobbies than me.”

The heat rose in Lance’s face, and he steadfastly resisted the urge to look at his mother to see if she’d noticed Zuza’s insinuation. Before he could figure out how to respond, Akani flipped off the burner on the stove and raised the saucepan full of hot chocolate.

“Drinks are ready!” she said. “Just give them a minute to cool down.”

“Great!” Lance said, his voice a little too high. “I’ll take two for the road.”

His mother arched an eyebrow. “For the road?”

Lance nodded, hopping up as Akani divided the cocoa among several mugs. “There’s something important I need to do tonight.”

* * *

Allura spent twenty minutes debating the relative merits of finding an abandoned room in some far-flung corner of the castle before deciding that, given how many new inhabitants the castle had picked up recently, she was actually less likely to be interrupted in her rooms.

She still wore her armor, and she left her staff leaning against the wall beside her bed. Both would be useless to her, of course, but they made her feel better.

She breathed in, held it for a moment, and then breathed out, clasping her hands at her waist. She raised her chin the way her father did when faced with a particularly difficult diplomatic problem. She tried to remember the whispered jokes her mother had used to tease a laugh out of Allura when she’d wound herself too tight.

She didn’t succeed on either count, but there was no helping that now. “Okay,” she said, squaring her stance and facing the door. She glanced down at the pad she held in her hand, which was connected to the castle’s central computer, and tapped a button to activate the hologram generators in her room, which she had kept off since waking from stasis.

Almost at once, a figure coalesced before her, paladin armor polished to a shine, a perfect mirror of her own. His eyes shone dully gold even through the blue hues of the hologram, and he tilted his head to the side in confusion as he took in her room.

Allura swallowed against her rising bile. “Hello, Zarkon.”

"Princess Allura.” Zarkon gave a shallow bow, the motion jerky, as though he were fighting against himself. That was impossible, of course. Zarkon, like all the paladins, had created his memory profile the day he was formally accepted by the Black Lion and had updated it once a year ever since, the last time being some seven months before the trip to Daibazaal that had ended in him betraying his team and family. This version of Zarkon was the man she remembered, loyal and kind, who had sparred with her and moaned when he lost to Coran at _eshet_ and inspired the other paladins to greatness.

Or had that man every truly existed? Zarkon had long been ambitious, with a festering rage that grew in strength each time his pride took a hit—but he must have been true once, if the Black Lion had chosen him.

Zarkon’s mouth opened, and then he hesitated. “Your pardon, Princess Allura. The castle’s systems are telling me more than ten thousand years have passed since my memory core was last updated. Is that correct?”

“It is.” Allura straightened, somehow more grounded with this reminder that she wasn’t dealing with Zarkon himself, but rather with a computer program that had access to his memories. To whatever memories he’d allowed to be uploaded. “You can access system memory to get yourself up to speed; I’m sure the answers to all your questions are there, and I don’t particularly care to explain it all myself.”

Zarkon blinked. The hologram flickered for a moment, probably taking Allura’s suggestion and reviewing all relevant files from the main computer. Curiosity sated, he settled into the role he was meant to play. “I betrayed you.”

For a moment, she could almost believe the sorrow that crept into his voice, and she didn’t flinch away from the hand he reached toward her. It had no substance, but still she tensed as the image settled on her shoulder. Zarkon’s brow was furrowed, and even without pupils, his eyes seemed to be roving over her face, searching for answers.

She’d like some of those herself.

“Why?” she demanded. “ _Why_ did you betray us? How long were you planning it? Why did you kill my mother?”

Zarkon’s breath caught, and he flinched back. “I—I don’t know,” he said. “I killed Lealle?”

The honest horror in his voice caught Allura off guard, and her voice failed her. Could he really not know? Not have any inkling what his real self had been planning? What would that even mean? Maybe Zarkon had held back memories that might betray his schemes, or maybe Zarkon—the real Zarkon—had never _planned_ anything. Maybe whatever happened on Daibazaal, whatever argument had been brewing between Zarkon and Allura’s father out of sight of the other paladins, had shattered those bonds in an instant.

“What happened?” She searched Zarkon’s face, letting the years slip away, if only for a moment. There had been a time when she considered Zarkon family. She’d gone to him for advice so many times, trusted him with some of her deepest insecurities. When she’d felt unworthy to be her father’s heir, when she’d been uncertain of her role and her future—Coran had usually been her first choice, but she’d trusted Zarkon nearly as much. “Can’t you tell me anything? I’ve been trying to make sense of it for so long, and I just… I just want answers.”

Zarkon opened his mouth, and the hologram glitched, Zarkon’s form flickering. For a moment he was much younger, much closer to the wide-eyed youth Allura had once chased through the castle’s halls. Without his scars, without the lines that aged his face and the sorrow and the guilt, he seemed a different person entirely.

Maybe they’d all been different people back then. Certainly Allura felt whole lifetimes away from the girl who had idolized her father’s every action.

“Allura...” The hologram flickered again, and a more familiar Zarkon stood once more before her, seemingly at a loss for words. “I’m sorry.”

She laughed, pulled away from him. “No. It was foolish of me to think you might have the answers I’m looking for.” Her breathing quickened, a vice tightening around her chest, and she swiped at her pad to dismiss Zarkon’s hologram before he could make another attempt at platitudes. Tears blurred her vision, and her armor felt like it was constricting around her chest, a prison fitted to her body, inescapable and unyielding.

She needed to be out of here. She needed to run, to hit something, to—to--

Allura opened the door, then stopped short, the breath rushing from her lungs.

Lance blinked, his elbow raised awkwardly as though he’d been about to knock. He held two steaming mugs in his hands, and he had only to look at her before sympathy swept across his face.

“Hey,” he said. “Want to talk about it?”

* * *

Sam shivered, his legs pulled up to his chest against the piercing chill of the prison cells. It always seemed worse after he'd cast his mind outward to watch over Rolo in the lab, and he wondered whether the trance-like state he entered actually lowered his body temperature. He'd been pushing himself too much lately, between his vigils when the druids experimented on Rolo and his own stints in their lab.

It was worth it, though, to know Rolo wasn't alone, even if he couldn't perceive Sam's presence until today.

If leaving his body sapped his energy, condensing himself enough to appear to another wandering mind drained him twice as quickly, and he'd been unable to hold his focus long enough to see what choice Rolo made. He wouldn't blame Rolo for choosing the escape but still, selfishly, he hoped he wouldn't be alone again. He didn't think he'd be able to handle it.

The shivers had almost stopped by the time the door opened again, and Sam's breath caught in his throat.

Rolo was barely conscious, his motions jerky and uncoordinated as he tried to get his feet under him. The guard that had been dragging him paid his struggles no mind and tossed him to the floor before turning to leave.

Sam didn't wait for the door to close behind them. He scrambled forward, lifting Rolo into his lap. The relief pounded in his ears, burned at the back of his eyes as tears gathered. He hated himself for being glad that Rolo would live to see more torture, but he couldn't lie to himself. He needed Rolo as much as Rolo needed him. More, maybe. Endless months of solitude hadn't broken him until he remembered what gentle touches felt like.

"Sam?" Rolo's voice was slurred, and his eyes struggled to focus. "You... I saw you."

Sam's anxiety spiked, and he glanced at the door, waiting for druids to appear, to put an end to Sam's fledgling attempts at espionage. "Shh," he said, pulling Rolo closer. His skin was icy cold, his whole body shaking with bone-deep tremors. "Hallucinations. Don't worry about that for now, son. Just rest. We can talk when you wake up."

Rolo was too out of it to protest, for which Sam was grateful. His ability to step outside himself was one of the few bits of leverage he had in this prison, and he was loathe to give it up.

But maybe--maybe, if they worked at it, and if Rolo could master this odd ability Sam had discovered--maybe they could find each other again in whatever dimension or plane their minds visited when they wandered. They could talk freely there, without fear of the druids listening in.

For the first time in a long while, Sam felt a spark of hope, and as Rolo's breathing evened out, Sam himself began to drift off. _Soon_ , he told himself. _We'll be able to figure something out... Soon..._

* * *

“So,” the prophet said, guiding Ryner toward a quieter section of the park. “I assume this is your first time at one of our gatherings.”

“Oh.” Ryner ducked her head, trying to look embarrassed as she scanned the crowd around her, searching for her companions. “Do I stick out that much?”

There. Joska stood with a group of creators, making what looked like a standard communicator out of scrap metal. She gave no outward sign that she was focused on anything other than the work before her, but her posterior antennae were trembling with suppressed anxiety, and she was angled in such a way as to track Ryner’s progress across the lawn with the prophet.

Zori stood a few feet farther on, staring openly, a drink held in a white-knuckle grip. Ryner caught his eye for the barest instant, but didn’t dare give him a signal to be less suspicious. Not with the enemy at her shoulder.

“Peace, friend,” the prophet said. That predatory smile still lurked at the corner of her mouth, but she’d adopted a placating, almost motherly air—odd, coming from someone who must have been fifty years Ryner’s junior. The woman was only just entering her middle years, a few wrinkles tugging at her eyes, her antennae just beginning to lose their luster. “You seemed overawed by our revel. The Children of Lubos wish everyone to feel welcome in our circle. Is there anything I can do for you?”

Her voice had an oily quality to it, a thin veneer of amiability that did little to cover the layers of suspicion, greed, and judgment beneath. Ryner was going to have to be delicate about this.

“Oh. Well, that’s very kind of you,” Ryner said. “It’s just all so new to me. One of my customers was telling me about you. Said I should give it a try. You know, I wasn’t going to—I put it off for a good long while. When you get to be my age, novelty doesn’t always sit right, you know?”

“Of course.” The prophet turned, catching Ryner’s hand between her own. “Please let me assure you, we will never ask more of you than you are willing to give. The mighty Lubos wants his people to be happy. You can come to these gatherings, eat our food, make some new friends, ask your questions—and if we’re not the right fit for you, you can be on your way.” She paused, firelight glittering in her eyes. “You said a customer told you about us?”

“That’s right,” Ryner said. _Delicate,_ she reminded herself. “I’ve been working at my daughter’s store ever since my old research group dissolved.”

The prophet’s antennae twitched once, eagerly. “Research group? What did you work on?”

“Oh, all the old questions, you know.” Ryner waved her hand vaguely. “My team was looking for new energy sources. Had a few promising leads, too. Not that it matters anymore.”

The greed was out in full force now, splashed across the prophet’s face like dappled forest shadows. She was holding herself back, but Ryner could tell she wanted nothing more than to snap Ryner up. _We only want your happiness,_ right. Ain-wa had been right. However the Cult dressed it up, they were seeking the kind of technological advances that would give one side the advantage in a military campaign. The prophets knew it; perhaps others did as well.

Smiling in sympathy, the prophet guided Ryner toward the refreshments. “You said your research group dissolved? Why was that? Were you afraid the Empire would seize your patents?”

A loaded question, not that the prophet gave any indication of its weight, other than her unwavering gaze. Ryner laughed. “Seize? No, no. They offered to buy them outright, even offered us new jobs—better jobs—in their own labs. I don’t know that I’d have gone, but I could have retired quite comfortably with that paycheck. But the rest of my team balked. Said they didn’t want to hand anything over to the Galra.”

“You disagreed?”

“What difference does it make? I went into research for the discoveries, not for philosophy.”

The prophet grabbed a wineglass off a nearby table and held it out to Ryner, smiling. “You’re wasted at your daughter’s store, ah—sorry. I didn’t catch your name.”

“Yara,” Ryner said. “And that’s very kind of you to say.”

“It’s the truth. Here.” She dug out a silver medallion. One side was engraved with a bust of King Lubos, the reverse inlaid with circuitry. “In case you’re ever looking for a change of pace. Bring this to the palace. Tell them Prophet Ane sent you.”

Ryner stared at the medallion, then curled her fingers over it and returned Ane’s smile. “Lubos bless you, child.”

A sudden crash from the outer edge of the park had them both spinning around. Ane’s face drained of color as cultists screamed and ran away from the tree that had suddenly toppled directly onto one of the refreshment tables. Food and shattered dishes littered the grass around the fallen tree, whose upper branches dipped into the bonfire. A fresh treefall should never have caught fire so easily, but even as prophets and party-goers streamed toward the trunk to check for injuries, the branches began to smolder.

Zori stood near the tangled mass of roots and soil, largely ignored by the frantic crowd—especially once Ane noticed the flames creeping toward the trunk and shouted a warning.

As she sprinted forward to help, Ryner glowered at Zori, but she took the opportunity to withdraw, regrouping with Zori and Joska near the entrance to the park. Joska smacked the side of Zori’s head.

“What the rot was that?” she demanded. “You could have hurt someone!”

“There was no one around, Joska, Lubos!” Zori rubbed the side of his head and pouted at Joska. “I waited until it was clear. Besides, didn’t you see? One of those prophet people had Elder Ryner cornered! I wasn’t just going to abandon her.”

Ryner tucked Ane’s medallion into an inner pocket, then squeezed Zori’s shoulder. “It was a little extreme, as distractions go, but I appreciate the help nonetheless.” She glanced back toward the swirl of flame and shadow at the center of the park as people scrambled about, trying to find a water source to put out the blaze. Most of the attendees had already fled, though a few stood in clusters near Ryner and her companions, watching the disaster with that numb fascination that disasters inspired. “In any case, I think we’ve learned as much as we’re going to for one night. Let’s go.”

* * *

Lance choked on his hot chocolate, coughed, and gaped at Allura. “Wait, _Zarkon?_ ” he demanded. “ _Zarkon_ has an AI on the castle-ship. Isn't that dangerous?”

Allura furrowed her brow, sipping her own cocoa. She’d seemed wary when Lance first told her what it was, but one sip had converted her, and she had both her hands wrapped around it like she was afraid Lance was going to take it back. “Of course it's not dangerous. The AIs can't do anything to harm the ship. In any case, Zarkon's doesn't seem to have been aware of his traitorous intentions."

"But _why_ does he have a memory profiles at all?"

"All the paladins made them. It's tradition. We just never activated Zarkon’s, seeing as he wasn’t technically dead.” She tilted her head to the side. “And why are you so surprised? You were waiting for me. With this... hot chocolate... and an offer to talk about it.”

“I knew you were doing _something,_ ” Lance said. “Not that it was _talking to Zarkon._ ” He shook his head and walked on, drumming his fingers on his cocoa mug. Allura was brimming with restless energy that didn’t let her sit still, so they’d decided to wander as they talked. “I mean, you were being all shifty about the reason you’d come back here, so I figured you were, like, gonna talk to your mom or—or maybe your dad had logs from his last visit to Olkarion or something.”

Allura flushed. “I suppose that would have been the more responsible thing to do,” she said. “Though I’m not sure how much help ten thousand year old histories will be to us now. No, I just… talking with Ryner, hearing about those Olkari who seem to have sided with Zarkon… It felt too much like when Zarkon betrayed us. That senseless hurt, the need for answers.”

Allura dropped her gaze to her cocoa, watching a lingering wisp of steam rise from the surface.

“I still don’t know why Zarkon did what he did. I activated his AI because… Well, because I was hoping it might be able to shed some light on his decision.”

Lance’s heart ached for her, and he ducked his head. “And…?”

“Nothing,” Allura said. “Either Zarkon wasn’t even thinking about betrayal the last time he updated the memory profile, or he made an effort from the start to keep those inclinations out of the official records.”

“You can do that?”

“Of course.” Allura sighed, leading them around a corner and onto the bridge that connected to one of the outlying towers. With the castle still in deep space, the windows showed nothing but a wash of stars, the faintest wisps of a far-off nebula visible ahead. “It’s difficult to describe the sensation, but… Imagine swimming in a river. The current will carry you along, but you can control your speed and direction to a certain extent, and if the water is shallow enough, you can stand up and stop yourself altogether.

“It’s the same with the memory upload. Let it run and it will transfer a copy of everything you remember. But you can redirect it away from specific memories, and, in theory, you could resist the pull altogether and only allow memories of your choosing to be uploaded.”

Lance shivered. He’d thought about the memory profiles a lot—probably more than was healthy, considering they were basically really fancy memorials for people who had died fighting the same war Lance himself was now caught up in. He’d considered whether it would be worthwhile to make memory profiles of their own.

Hearing what it was like, though, made him reconsider. Did he want to lay himself bare like that? To get swept away by the current of his own life?

“Wait.” Lance turned around, walking backwards so he could scrutinize Allura. “Do _you_ have an AI?”

A smile flashed across her face. “Not a functional one. Not yet. It takes quite a lot of time to piece together a coherent profile. New paladins typically spend a full day in a memory chamber—but then, most paladins are considerably older than us.”

“But you’ve done the memory transfer thingy before, right? You talk like you have firsthand experience?”

“Yes.” Allura’s steps slowed, her gaze drifting to the window beside them and the view of space beyond. “Tradition in my family says heirs build their profile in stages on significant days in their life. Two hours on the day my father officially named me as his heir, four more when I reached the age of majority. I should have added to it after my first successful solo negotiation, or another similar milestone. Formally, the profile isn’t completed until the day of my coronation, but it’s often functionally complete long before then.”

“Huh.” Lance watched her for a long moment. He’d never realized before how much her royal standing had shaped her, but he saw it now: layers of duty and tradition pressing down on her, compacting her into something proud and unyielding. She bore it well, and hell if it hadn’t saved them all on more than one occasion when the rest of them were fracturing under the pressure, Allura the lone rock in the center of the storm.

But he couldn’t help wondering what she would have been like if she’d been allowed to have a normal childhood. If she hadn’t been preparing for her own death for most of her life.

Eventually, Allura shook herself and continued walking, Lance keeping pace, though his mind was in other places. Blue was a distant, fuzzy presence in his mind—watching, yes, but not really _there._ He caught snatches of her voice from time to time, but could make no sense of it—so it was with some surprise that he found himself in the elevator, pressing the button for Blue’s hangar.

He grunted, but didn’t bother to press the button for a different floor. Blue was as good a place as any to talk.

Allura glanced over at him, eyes sharp once more. “Something wrong?”

“No,” he said. “Just running on autopilot, I guess. Hope you don’t mind stopping in to see Blue.”

“Not at all,” Allura said. “I assumed you were bringing me here for a reason.”

Lance laughed. “Nah, I’m not that clever.”

They reached the bottom and the doors slid open, but Blue wasn’t alone in the hangar. Wyn knelt on the ground between her front paws, hands in his lap, head tilted back so he could see the lion’s face. His voice drifted across the hangar, too soft for Lance to catch more than fragments of the one-sided conversation.

“What’s Wyn doing here?” Lance muttered.

Allura had stopped beside Lance at the elevator door, keen curiosity sparking in her eyes. “Has he been here before?”

“Not that I know of.” Lance reached out to Blue, searching her mind for an answer, but when he met resistance he backed off. He was reluctant to disturb Wyn—doubly so to violate the privacy of… whatever this was. Blue was a fantastic source of comfort, and if anyone needed that it was Wyn. After everything he’d suffered in Project Robeast, he deserved somewhere safe to talk about whatever he felt he needed to talk about.

Still, it felt weird to see somebody who wasn’t a paladin talking to one of the lions. Lance thought of Green and the bond she’d forged with Karen Holt. An adjunct bond, Pidge had called it. Something entirely separate from the paladin bond. Allura and Coran could offer no theories about what it meant, or whether the other lions might form similar attachments to other people in the future. Was it possible Blue had chosen Wyn to be her adjunct? Wouldn’t Lance have sensed something like that, the way Pidge had sensed their mother bonding with Green?

Maybe not. This was uncharted territory, after all. What held true for one adjunct bond might not hold true for the rest.

Blue raised her head, startling Wyn into silence. Both turned toward the door, and Lance raised his hands in a calming gesture as Wyn scrambled to his feet, eyes wide. Before Lance could get any reassurances out, however, a pulse of energy washed through him, wiping all other thoughts from his head. From Allura’s sharp intake of breath, she’d felt it, too.

Lance frowned. “What…?”

Blue’s eyes flared with golden light, drawing Lance in, and the hangar around them faded from view.

For a moment, he stood somewhere else, the scene lit with the hues of sunset though an alien sun burned high overhead. The details of the image kept shifting like a kaleidoscope spinning in his head. Lance got the impression he was standing in a crowd of hundreds, but however hard he tried, he couldn’t make sense of the faces around him. Below him?

He watched through Blue’s eyes as someone in the armor of the blue paladin walked out into the center of the celebration, tore off his helmet, and thrust it into the air. He grinned as a cheer answered him.

Lance was left reeling, shaken free from the vision for a moment as he recognized the paladin below. It was Wyn, older now, with short, tight black curls that lifted away from his scalp as they came free from the helmet. He looked closer to seventeen now, his frame more solid and his face leaner, though his cheek dimpled when he smiled.

The Red and Black Lions soared overhead, igniting another cheer from the crowd as they landed, and a moment later their paladins emerged—only one from each of the lions, which struck Lance as odd. Did they go back one paladin per lion after the war? Or were the rest of the paladins somewhere else?

The red paladin sprinted forward, pulling Wyn into a headlock and ruffling his hair. The black paladin, meanwhile, approached more sedately, waving to the indistinct crowd around them. She already had her helmet off, so Lance could see her lopsided smile. She was a Galra woman, broad-shouldered and easily eight feet tall so she towered over the other two. She had big, fluffy ears, her fur peppered with gray, and she paused to talk to a few short figures that had separated from the crowd—children, maybe, who only came up to the paladin’s knees.

The red paladin finally pulled off her helmet, releasing a cascade of dark, wavy hair falling out of its loose braid. Like the black paladin, she was in her middle years, with laugh lines around her mouth and a touch of gray at her temples, and she tilted Wyn’s chin up, looking him over for signs of injury like--

Lance stumbled, the vision fading in an instant. He groped for something to steady himself on and found Allura, who caught him easily, wide eyes staring at Blue.

“He’s going to be a paladin,” she whispered, glancing back down at Wyn, who remained frozen, watching Allura and Lance warily.

“Wyn is?” Lance croaked. He could feel himself shaking, the red paladin’s face flashing through his mind. “ _Wyn?_ ”

Allura nodded, absently. “So it would seem. Not for some time, of course. Twenty or thirty years, at a guess.”

Lance’s stomach plummeted. Right. Alteans aged more slowly than other species. Twenty or thirty years. That could easily mean--

“And Edi, too,” Allura murmured. She smiled, her grip on Lance’s arm tightening. “Not that I’m terribly surprised about that.”

Lance tried to remember the black paladin’s face. He hadn’t paid her much mind, but now that he thought about it, those ears… Yeah, it could very easily be Edi a couple decades from now. And the red paladin--

“So, wait,” Lance said. “What does that mean for now? They’re not paladins yet, are they?”

“Quiznak! Of course not.” Allura tore her gaze away from Blue and Wyn, dropping her voice low so Wyn wouldn’t overhear. “They’re still children. A bit of self-defense training wouldn’t be amiss, I suppose, and they can certainly be allowed to bond with the lions at their own pace, but I imagine it will be years yet before they begin any sort of intensive training regimen. Longer than that for Wyn, maybe. For now they’re more like… apprentices. Potential successors.”

Lance swallowed. “We’re not going to tell them, though, right? Not for a while?”

“That may be wise,” Allura said slowly. “Give them more time to be children.”

Lance nodded. He wanted to say something more, but his tongue felt heavy, and when Allura broke away to go reassure a guilt-ridden Wyn that he wasn’t in trouble, Lance couldn’t make himself follow. He thought again of the red paladin, who for just a moment had looked familiar. He wanted to think it was just a trick of the light, or the kaleidoscope quality of it making him see things that weren’t there. He knew that was just wishful thinking.

Because he knew that smile, those eyes, so like his mother's.

Luz.

His sister was going to be a paladin.


	11. The Vivaskari

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Ryner, along with Zori and Joska (two other Olkari rebels), infiltrated a meeting of the Cult of Lubos, where Ryner earned an invitation to the palace. The Cult is as she expected--a way for Zarkon to trick Olkari into making military technology for the Galra armies. Meanwhile Lance, Allura, and Pidge returned to the castle-ship to try to sneak it into the system. Allura had a conversation with Zarkon's AI that told her nothing about his reasons for betraying the team. Afterwards, she and Lance went for a walk that ended in Blue's hangar, where they saw a vision of some twenty or thirty years in the future that showed Edi as the black paladin, Wyn as the blue, and Lance's sister Luz as the red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter features some (untranslated) dialogue in Karii, the primary language of Olkarion. If you're on a computer, you can hover your cursor over the text to see a translation. For mobile/touchscreen users, translations are provided in the chapter end notes.

“Team building.” Layeni shifted her weight to one side, dark eyes boring into the side of Akira’s head.

He resisted the urge to fidget and focused instead on reviewing the last of the maintenance logs for today. “Yes,” he said. “We just doubled the size of the Guard, and now no one knows anyone. We’re going to be living and working in close quarters for the foreseeable future; we should at least pretend to get along.”

Layeni shook her head, an incredulous laugh escaping. “Just as long as you don’t ask me to participate in Two Truths and a Lie.”

“Please.” Akira approved the last log, then closed out of the viewscreen and gave Layeni a look of mock offense. “I want people to _want_ to be there. Let’s save the icebreakers for when we need to discipline them.”

Holding up her hands, Layeni backed off. “All right, Commander.” She grinned as he scowled at her, but—damn it all—she was military. More so than Takashi had ever been, and Takashi followed protocol almost religiously. Akira was never going to convince Layeni to ignore his rank. At least once they stepped out of the computer room they’d turned into their temporary command deck, she relaxed her posture. Marginally. “So what’s our approach?”

 _Approach._ She said it like this was some sort of mission, like they had to have a plan of attack so the enemy couldn’t catch them off guard.

“Uh…” Akira led them toward the elevator. “Akani’s been baking all day and she said I could take whatever I wanted, because who else is gonna eat it, right?” He shrugged. “So we bribe the Guard with pastries, and maybe some nunvill if we can find it.”

“Nunvill?”

Akira pursed his lips. “It’s not technically alcohol, but it has the burn and from what my brother’s told me it does just about as much to lower inhibitions.”

“Awesome.” Layeni’s voice dripped sarcasm. “So we get our soldiers drunk and pack them full of sugar and hope that makes them friends.”

“We’ll be there to give them a little push in the right direction,” he said.

Layeni nodded, flashing him a plastic smile. “Oh, of course. What could _possibly_ go wrong?”

Akira rolled his eyes and slouched against the back wall of the elevator. “You know, I think I _actually_ like you better when you’re treating me like a commanding officer.”

“Sir,” she barked, falling into attention at his side almost _too_ easily. “I can stick to this twenty-four-seven, sir, just say the word.”

Only the mischievous glint in her eye clued him in to the fact that she wasn’t entirely serious. Which, on the bright side, was proof positive that Layeni _had_ a mischievous side.

Unfortunately, it only ever came out when they were alone, which meant her jokes were almost always at Akira’s expense. Still, he’d take a little friendly ribbing over the sharp salutes and looks of open awe that were all he got from half the new recruits. New Altea didn’t know that Akira was just some ex-cargo pilot who’d jumped straight to Lieutenant Commander by virtue of being the first to think to ask where the castle kept its fighters. To them, he was a war hero, never mind he’d only been in one battle to date.

Well, he was just going to have to learn to live with his rank, and the Guard was just going to have to learn to live with having a C.O. who liked to go out drinking with his subordinates. Compromise was a beautiful thing.

Akani had already called it quits for the night by the time they reached the kitchen, but she’d packaged all the baked goods in the castle’s equivalent of Tupperware: clear-topped square dishes that sealed with the press of a button, creating partial stasis inside. They apparently used a cheaper version of the cryopod technology to keep food fresher longer. Basically they were portable freezers with an instantaneous defrost mode.

There was a note near the stack of Tupperpods in Akani’s looping hand that read, _Two boxes on the island are for the ground team. Take everything else._

The “everything” was underlined twice.

Akira had to laugh at that, but hey. He had his orders. Layeni found a serving cart in a nearby supply room, and they loaded it up with baked goods, which they wheeled (well, floated) back down to the common area in the Second Cohort’s tower. Akira got on the comms and broadcast an all-call throughout Blue Tower. Within moments, people started to trickle in, some in full uniform, jogging in with the kind of posture that said they were ready for anything from a lecture to menial labor to full-out battle.

Others were still in their pajamas, rubbing sleep from their eyes.

Akira remained standing at attention at the center of the room, counting off pilots until the last pair stumbled in, ten full minutes after the all-call went out. They noticed the rest of the Guard staring at them and ducked their heads, shuffling to get in line with everyone else. Somebody cleared their throat, and Jeya bounced from foot to foot, her eyelids drooping.

“Okay,” Akira said, glancing at Layeni. “Chalk that up to something else we’ll have to practice in the coming days.”

“This was a pathetic showing, sir,” she said, and Akira still had to fight the urge to flinch at her harsh tone. “I’ll be sure they know what’s expected of them in the future.”

He nodded. “Very good, Lieutenant. For tonight, though, we’ll go easy on them. This isn’t an ordinary scramble, as you may have gathered from the lack of alarms and explosions.”

There were a few chuckles at that, and Jeya waved a hand in the air. “So if it’s not a battle, why are we here?”

Akira glanced at Layeni, and the two of them stepped aside to reveal the tables they’d set with a variety of sweets and a punch bowl full of nunvill. “It’s been an intense couple of days of training—weeks for some of you. And it’s only going to get harder from here. So take a look around the room.” He paused as the pilots swiveled their heads first one way then the other. “The people around you right now? They’re your family. When you’re out there in the thick of battle, these are the people who are going to keep you alive. We’re the Voltron Guard, one unit, not a collection of mercenaries each fighting their own fight.

“Now, you ought to know your squad by now, at least a little. You survive hell with Lieutenant Layeni here and you wind up with some unbreakable bonds. And that’s a good start. You’ll need to be able to anticipate your squad’s movements at all times.

“Tonight isn’t about that.” Akira crossed his arms, surveying the room. “Tonight is about getting to know the people you may not see in training every day. It’s about Layeni and I getting to know you. So go ahead and help yourself to some food, a little bit of nunvill, and strike up a conversation with someone you’ve never talked to before.”

This speech was met with more than a few blank stares, and a number of appraising looks shared across the room. The pilots had mostly arranged themselves by squad, and several of these squads moved as a unit, some headed to the refreshment table, some cautiously approaching similarly cohesive squads who had backed themselves into corners.

Akira grabbed himself a glass of nunvill and retreated to the wall near Layeni, who stood with her hands tucked behind her back, spine straight, chin high. They watched the room, silent, for a long moment, tracking the tension as it slowly eased. It was always awkward, these first conversations with strangers, but the Guard was good at following orders—enough of them were, anyway. Squads introduced themselves to squads, and it slowly spread out from there.

It quickly became obvious that having two officers watching them from the sidelines was getting in the way of organic connection, so Akira knocked back the last of his nunvill and waded in himself. He started with the handful of pilots he’d talked with before, greeting them by name and having them introduce him to their conversation partners. (He was going to memorize everyone’s name. He was. He’d nearly been there, too, before the influx of pilots from New Altea.)

Conversations multiplied, but they were still the awkward, stilted conversations of someone being told to get to know someone else. It was a start, but it wasn’t enough.

At least people were flowing toward the refreshments now, relaxed enough that they didn’t immediately assume it was some sort of trick. Akira watched the motion, weighing his options. Then he turned and headed for a cluster in the center of the room made up of two Galra and an Altean from New Altea, plus Jeya and Evri from Anamuri’s rebels. Akira listened for a moment—it was the deep space equivalent of chatting about the weather, so nothing important.

He cleared his throat, and instantly the entire group turned to face him. “So is it true ethanol is considered a deadly poison in some regions of space?”

“You’ve heard of it on Earth, then?” Evri asked. “Yeah. Won’t kill everyone, but it’s dangerous enough to be labeled a Class Three controlled substance in most systems.”

“That so?” Akira nodded. “On Earth, we have contests to see who can drink the most.”

“ _What?!_ ”

This cry came from Allva, another Altean who had been engaged in a totally separate conversation. Akira hid a smile as ey broke into Akira’s circle, eir original conversation partners trailing after em. A few other groups had looked over at the outburst, and Akira—practiced diva that he was—swelled under the attention.

“It’s true. It’s not exactly _safe_ , but it happens. People drink ethanol all the time.”

A few people muttered cries of disbelief, but Jordan, another former Garrison pilot, confirmed it, winning himself a round of awestruck looks. “Would it be weird if I also told you that one of the most popular forms of recreation in my country regularly causes traumatic brain injuries?”

This was met with another loud cry of disbelief and Tosk, a Nkorian from Anamuri’s rebels, thumped one of his four hands on his chest. Nkorians were a burly, reptilian species with short, sharp horns on the crown of their heads. “Well, do your people possess the regenerative abilities to regrow a missing limb?”

“No,” Jordan said, “but we can sometimes reattach them surgically.”

Akira sipped his nunvill, amused, as several other members of the Guard chimed in with their own escalating stories of the oddities of their species or home planets. Layeni gave him knowing a look from across the room, and he smiled back at her innocently. In all honesty, he’d been mostly certain Coran had been messing with him about alcohol being a registered substance. He’d seemed horrified when Akira had asked if nunvill had alcohol in it, but no. Apparently intoxicating drinks on most planets contained a different substance altogether, albeit one that had the same effects as very dilute alcoholic drinks.

Zuza, apparently having wandered in at some point in the conversation, draped her arms around Jordan and Tosk and said, “I heard it used to rain flaming rocks on Altea. Is that true?”

Everyone turned to their Altean neighbors, who shrugged and murmured about the old stories.

“Oh, that one’s definitely true,” Akira said. “My brother once stumbled into one of Princess Allura’s memories about running through a flarestorm. Freaked him the fuck out, too, let me tell you.”

"What?" Jeya cried.

Zuza laughed aloud. "You're joking!"

Akira shook his head, and the chatter broke out again, more animated this time, with a combination of one-upsmanship and friend-of-a-friend stories competing for eager ears. Akira left them all to it and rejoined Layeni at the fringes of the group, smiling as he sauntered over.

“You got lucky,” she said, scowling.

Akira just grabbed a new glass of nunvill and smiled into the cup as he took a sip. “Lucky? Or did I spend two days talking with Coran and finding out humans are apparently the weird-ass survivalist species in the universe? Did you know we can survive in a temperature range nearly twice that of the universal average?”

Layeni arched an eyebrow in his direction. “Riveting stuff.”

“Tell me about it.” Akira shuddered as the nunvill went down, then leaned back against the buffet table. “I guess a lot of it comes down to us being Quintessence factories.”

“Gotta be some payoff for being living batteries,” she said wryly.

Akira glanced at her, trying to tell if he’d crossed a line, but she just raised her glass in a toast and flashed a crooked smile. Akira returned the gesture.

Zuza danced among the pilots, her laugh bright and her smile infectious. She never failed to leave her conversation partners in stitches, but she didn’t linger long with any one group. Jeya trailed after her for a time, the two of them trading banter in short, swift bouts as they wandered from one group to the next. Akira couldn’t tell if the diminutive reptilian girl annoyed Zuza or if it was an affectionate sort of exasperation, but she didn’t tell Jeya to leave.

Eventually, they broke away from the mob of pilots. Zuza spotted Akira and waved, heading toward him with her hands in her pockets. She wore clothes with a decidedly human aesthetic, which likely meant Lance had made them for her, but she seemed comfortable in them.

“Nice party,” Zuza said, stealing another cookie as she joined Akira and Layeni. Jeya grabbed a glass of nunvill—her third for the evening—but at a stern look from Layeni, she reluctantly put it back and grabbed a small truffle instead.

Akira surveyed the Guard, satisfaction brimming within him. The earlier awkwardness had dissipated, and the air now was something much more like a party than a mandatory work function. “Thanks,” he said. “Did you come here looking for me?”

“Nah, nothing like that.” Zuza studied her cookie intently, a faint rumble entering her voice. “Guess I might as well ask you something while I’m here, though, right?”

“Sure. What’s on your mind?”

“How did you know this was what you were supposed to do?”

Akira turned, arching his eyebrows. “Where’s this coming from?”

She ducked her head. “It’s nothing. Just—trying to figure out where I fit on the castle. I always had the kiddos to look out for before, and now everyone else seems to have a role to play. Tev and Zelka are up on the bridge, Keithy-boy’s a paladin, you’ve got the Guard…” She glanced at him, eyes burning bright. “How’d you figure out where you fit?”

Akira ran a hand through his hair and resisted the urge to laugh. The thought that he gave off the vibe of _fitting_ in a command role was just the sort of irony that would have Takashi in stitches. “I didn’t figure it out so much as fall into it, really. I mean, I trained as a pilot back on Earth, so I’ve got a leg up, but honestly? I just hit a point where I had to do something, and no one was doing this yet, so… Here I am.”

Zuza frowned, considering that. She looked like she wanted to ask another question, but it never came. Her ear twitched, and she suddenly looked up at the door. Akira followed her gaze and found Thace standing there, head cocked to the side. The scars knotting one side of his head still looked fresh, though the cryopod had long since closed them up. It gave him a dangerous look, but the expression on his face was… curious.

“Hey,” Akira said, hesitating only a moment before waving him in. “Join us. There’s plenty to eat.”

Thace met Akira’s eyes, mouth twitching like he saw right through the ruse. The man was an enigma—an enigma who had hurt Keith, whether or not he meant to. Takashi assured Akira that Keith had given his consent to Thace’s continued presence on the castle-ship, but that didn’t stop Akira’s suspicion. Thace had more secrets than Iverson, and that was saying something. And though Akira respected a person’s right to privacy, his consideration only extended as far as he could be sure his brothers weren’t paying the price. It might be a good idea to get to know Thace a little bit, to observe him when he might have his guard down, at least a little bit.

Thace entered the room, though he kept close to the wall and ignored the food and drink on the tables. He watched the crowd like he expected an attack at any moment, and he softly deferred any attempt at conversation.

Jeya, undaunted, found a perch on a chair back near him and chattered away, gesticulating wildly as Thace watched her with understated amusement.

Akira leaned back against the wall across the room, watching. _I’ll figure out your game,_ he thought. _Whatever you’re hiding’s gotta come out eventually._ He just hoped it wasn’t anything that put the team at risk—for Thace’s sake.

* * *

The hardest part was finding the Vivaskari. Shiro and Aransha headed to an area known to be frequented by one of the cells Ryner and Aransha had both traded with in the past. The forest was thick here, and as the day wore on, shadows began to gather between the trees, plunging them into an early twilight.

They stopped in a small hollow between two hills, a gap in the trees providing a dazzling view of the night sky. Shiro stared at the sky for a moment, and only tore his eyes away when Aransha pressed her hand to a tree at the edge of the clearing and grew two beds from the roots.

“Is it that much farther to the Vivaskari cell?” Shiro asked.

Aransha smiled as she shook out a blanket over one of the beds. In many ways, she reminded Shiro of Ryner—her face soft and leathery, her smile filled with a grandmother’s indulgence. She was not the military mind Ryner had been, but she had a head for organization and an impressive memory for facts and figures.

“They are close,” Aransha said, pulling off her outer cloak, which she wadded up at the head of her bed as a pillow. “But we will not find them tonight.”

Shiro frowned. It was true he’d seen no sign of other Olkari in the area, but he’d assumed that was because he didn’t know what to look for. “In the morning, then?”

“Perhaps.” Aransha sighed as she lowered herself onto her bed, her knees cracking as she did so. She relaxed back against the tree trunk, rubbing her knee. “They will find us when they are ready. I doubt very much we could find them if they wish to stay hidden.”

“They’re a very cautious people, these Vivaskari.”

“Indeed, they are. It has kept them alive this long.”

She seemed content to leave it at that, and after a moment’s hesitation, Shiro took a seat on the second bed, lay back, and gazed up at the stars. These weren’t the constellations he was used to, but there was something familiar about the night sky on any world. Something about the countless lights sparkling in a pitch black sky and the occasional speck of color breaking the black and white rule.

Aransha’s breathing slowed beside him, and Shiro wondered how she could be so at ease out here alone in the forest. They had comms and could call for aide in an emergency, but it would take time for anyone to get here.

And yet Aransha slept, unperturbed by the unknown. She and Ryner must have worked well together—both soft-spoken and steady, with the will to lead their people and the wisdom to listen to counsel. It was all too easy to forget that the paladins had all led different lives before coming together for this fight.

He wondered if Aransha resented the paladins for taking Ryner away from her people.

There were no answers to be had tonight, so Shiro settled in, pulling his blanket out of his pack and wrapping it around himself. It was early summer in Vivasi, the evening air pleasantly warm, and Shiro hardly needed the extra protection of the blanket. But the weight was a comfort in its own right, and soon the sounds of the forest lulled him into a fitful sleep.

* * *

The castle was quiet that night. Coran and Pidge had just finalized their plans to bring the castle-ship into Olkarion’s system and keep it hidden. They would run it by Allura in the morning before making the move, and Coran had had surprisingly little trouble convincing Pidge to call it a night. They’d retired to their room, promising to go to bed after a short call to their mother on New Altea.

With Tev on shift on the bridge for now, Coran should have been sleeping himself. He had to be up in six hours to relieve Tev—but despite retiring to his room and completing his evening routine, Coran found he couldn’t quiet his mind. He lay on his bed for nearly an hour, staring at the ceiling as his thoughts ran circles around him. Thoughts of the war, of Olkarion and Earth and Altea, dissolved into memories of a time before the war. He thought of people he would never see again, of a million conversations he’d had with Zarkon that might have warned of what was to come.

Well. No point in wasting time on unproductive thoughts like those. Coran tossed his blankets aside, got dressed, and set out on the rounds that had become something of a habit in the last weeks. The castle hosted far more people now than it had when he’d first emerged from the cryopod, and any one of them might need an understanding ear. The least Coran could do was supply it.

He found Yvis first, tucked away in a plush armchair in a nook in the archives. Ze barely looked up from hir reading when Coran poked his head in, mumbled a negative when he asked if ze needed anything, and merely grunted when he bid hir a good evening.

Lance and Allura were Coran’s next stop on the tour. They’d taken over the couch in the rec room, blankets piled high around them as they conversed in low voices.

“Doing all right, you two?” Coran asked brightly when they turned toward him.

Allura beamed and raised a steaming mug toward him. “Wonderful! Lance introduced me to hot chocolate today. You should give it a try.”

Lance chuckled, drained the last of his own mug, and set it aside. “Hunk’s mom is the real hero here. I’ll ask her to make some for you next time we’re doing cocoa.”

“Cocoa?” Coran arched an eyebrow. “Sounds like an adventure.”

“I guess?” Lance tugged a blanket down over his feet, which he’d pulled up onto the couch cushion. “Anyway, Allura was just telling me some stories from when she was a kid.”

“Cluing him into the terror you were to your caretakers, are we?” Coran smoothed his mustache as Lance laughed and Allura pouted. “Well, far be it from me to interrupt.”

Lance stretched out a hand as Coran turned to go. “Wait, did you need something?”

Coran smiled. “No, no, nothing like that. Just wanted to make sure everyone’s doing all right before I turn in. You two carry on; I’ve still got a few stops to make.”

His step was light as he left, though something in him had begun to drag. It was a creeping fatigue, a weight in his core that had been there for some time, but always before there had been some more pressing matter to deal with.

He pushed it down once more and continued on his way, stopping by the paladins’ quarters—no light or sound coming from Pidge’s room to indicate they were burning the proverbial midnight Quintessence—and then the residential floor below that, where a number of the castle’s other inhabitants were staying, including the Galra refugees and Lance and Hunk’s mothers. The new additions from New Altea had settled in easily, and what few were still awake at this hour had their doors open, the sounds of laughter drifting out.

Zelka, the humans, and one of the New Altean couples who had brought children aboard were gathered in one room, discussing the challenges of raising children in wartime. They greeted Coran warmly when they caught sight of him, but he didn’t linger long enough to be drawn into conversation. They all seemed to be in good spirits, and Coran doubted there was very much he could add to the conversation in any case.

The only others still awake at this hour were Akira, Layeni, and the rest of the Voltron Guard. They were gathered in the Second Cohort’s common area, laughing and telling stories. It seemed like an eternity ago that Coran had sat in this very room with his fellow soldiers, trying desperately to forget the horrors they’d seen on the battlefield.

That desperation was absent from the room today. It wasn’t that these young people hadn’t seen horrors; many of them had come from Anamuri’s rebel forces, where they’d fought against Zarkon’s regime for years. Even among those who’d been recruited on New Altea, there were _asothra_ , who had fled the Empire and found refuge in their self-imposed exile.

These people knew what they were up against, and that any of them might die before the war was over. But they had purpose, and they were building a community, which were things Coran had been lacking in his Guard days.

Zuza’s laugh rose above the harmony of voices, and Coran spotted her chatting with Layeni, who appeared to be a bit tipsy. The normally reserved woman’s gestures were broader than usual, her eyes scrunching up as she laughed along with Zuza. Akira shook his head, watching them with a blend of amusement and exasperation.

Thace was there, also, keeping to himself at the far side of the room, but Jeya had claimed a perch near him and seemed to be peppering him with an endless barrage of questions.

Thace turned just before Coran moved on, and for a moment their eyes met. Coran saw something of himself reflected in the other man’s eyes. The same aimlessness, the same vacancy waiting for a new purpose to fill it. A frown flickered across Thace’s face, and Coran backed out of the room before the exchange could progress any farther than that.

He retreated back to the heart of the castle, ears twitching in anticipation of pursuit. He heard no footsteps behind him, but he didn’t slow until he was back in his room, his heart pounding harder than his hasty retreat could justify.

Shaking, Coran sank onto his bed and dropped his head into his hands. Everyone was doing fine. They were all… fine. For once, there were no fires to be extinguished, no festering emotional problems he could help to soothe.

There was just him, and the rapidly fading ghosts of his past.

That was the problem, wasn’t it? The universe was not the same as it had been ten thousand years ago. Everyone Coran had known was dead except for Allura, Meri, and Zarkon. The castle was filling up with new faces, a new community. The worlds they visited had adapted to life post-Altea. By now, even Allura and Meri were moving on with their lives. They would never forget what they had lost, but they had found new purpose, built new relationships. Coran had, too.

He’d thought he had, anyway. He’d made himself available to the new paladins, offering them a kind word and a gentle nudge when they needed it.

It was only now that he realized he’d held all of himself back from each of these interactions. Allura and Meri aside, how much did any of them know about Coran? He’d shown Lance his old Guard quarters and confessed the insecurities that had plagued him in his youth—insecurities long since put to rest.

What of Lealle’s death? What of Zarkon’s betrayal? What of the last week he’d had with the people who had become his family, when he’d said goodbye to them each, one by one, before locking himself in a cryopod in the hopes that new paladins might one day find him and release him? That week felt like a dream, insubstantial and faded, but always lurking at the edges of his mind.

It stirred now, all the grief and guilt he thought he’d put to rest rising in his throat like bile. It was like he’d been running down a mountain, his momentum helping him keep his balance. Now he’d slowed, and the weight of the past caught him up at last, bringing him crashing to his knees.

He stood, shaking off his glum mood, and strode for the bathroom, hoping a hot shower might clear his head. This was no time to go losing himself to the past, after all. He’d borne these old scars this long without trouble; he could bear it all for a little while longer. At least until they’d finished on Olkarion. At least until he could spare the time it would take to patch up the cracks Zarkon’s betrayal had wrought in the foundation of his life.

Until then, he would continue to be what his new family needed him to be: a friendly smile, an optimistic outlook, and a rock for them to cling to when the universe began to rage.

* * *

It was still dark when Shiro awoke, unknown creatures chattering somewhere in the underbrush. Shiro cracked his eyes open, the glow of Olkarion’s moon bathing the clearing in pale light.

The light must have woken him, for Aransha slept on, her slow breathing filling the darkness beyond Shiro’s reach. His shoulder and arm ached; he’d forgotten to remove his prosthetic last night. After nearly a year with Haggar’s version grafted to his body, he sometimes forgot that the new prosthetic was held on by a custom socket and suspension system. It was easier to remember on the ship, where he had Matt to help him with the harness. Out here in the field, he supposed he hadn’t wanted leave himself vulnerable.

Well, nothing had attacked them so far, and his prosthetic was an uncomfortable, unyielding lump beneath him in the narrow bed. He could make do without it for a few hours, at least.

As he sat up to manipulate the harness, however, unease prickled across Shiro’s skin. He froze, eyes searching the darkness. The clearing was deserted, but the forest beyond faded quickly into impenetrable black. There could be an army massing there, and Shiro would never known until they made their attack.

The thought settled into his gut in a cold, heavy lump, and Shiro swung his legs to the ground. He didn’t stand; not yet, but he reached into his belt pouch for the bracelets he kept there—the Gorvarian wrist daggers Nyma had taught him to use—and slipped them over his hands.

“Who’s there?” he hissed, pitching his voice low so as not to disturb Aransha. He leaned forward to put more of his weight on his feet, ready to stand, or dodge, at a moment’s notice. “I know you’re out there.”

“ _O besvataum auk ozhahi diniti newo._ ”

The voice came from right beside his ear, and Shiro cried out, leaping to his feet and backing away from the bed. His first instinct was to head for deeper shadow, but whoever was watching him was obviously comfortable in that darkness. Shiro changed course, retreating to the center of the clearing, where the light was best, and realized belatedly that he’d activated his daggers, which trailed moonlight the length of his forearms. He spun with measured steps, scanning the shadows for signs of the one who had spoken.

“Are you the Viviaskari?” he asked. “If so, we mean you no harm. We only wish to speak with you.”

“Hush, child.” Aransha’s voice was rough with sleep, and her blanket rustled as she stirred. “And put away those weapons. They have no place here.”

Shiro hesitated—a moment too long, as it turned out. Something swished behind him, the sound of fabric ghosting over fallen leaves. He turned just in time to see a figure swathed in voluminous clothes close on him, arm outstretched. Shiro swung a fist on instinct, blade singing as it split the air.

The figure touched two fingers to the side of Shiro’s prosthetic, just below the elbow. Something clicked, like two magnets snapping together, and Shiro’s prosthetic dropped like dead weight. It dragged at his shoulder, harness straps digging into his skin, and he hissed. He swung again with his off hand as the figure retreated, but his balance was off, and not only from his unresponsive arm; his daggers had deactivated without him noticing, and they refused to extend no matter how many times he tried.

“ _Shiro_ ,” Aransha said, voice sharp. “ _Neht vas punvata. Vask neht ohl ininita._ ”

The garbled words hit Shiro like a slap, freezing him in place.

No.

Not garbled. They just weren’t translating. He stared at Aransha, dumbstruck, and though he could barely make out her face in the darkness, she seemed to recognize the incomprehension in his face, for she sighed, then turned to another figure Shiro could just see lurking at the edge of the light. She spoke to them in—what was that, Karii? It must have been Karii, the words so rapid and silky Shiro couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began.

Someone approached through the leaf litter behind Shiro, not even trying to be stealthy this time. He began to turn, but Aransha stopped him with a sharp, “ _Pasc , Shiro._”

The command in her voice was clear, but Shiro couldn’t fight the urge to turn and look over his shoulder. The same figure as before, or at least someone dressed in similarly voluminous clothes, inched toward him, spear held to their shoulder. As they came into the moonlight, he could make out large Olkari eyes beneath their cowl, but little else.

The voice Aransha had been speaking with suddenly barked out an order, and the figured behind Shiro called a response that sounded affirmative. They drove their spear point-first into the ground and approached Shiro, hands held up in a disarming gesture.

Shiro glanced to Aransha, and she gestured him forward. “ _Pasc, Shiro. Vak o aul prece. Pasc.” _

She repeated that last word several more times. _Pasc. Pasc, Shiro, pasc._ From her tone and the encouraging motions, Shiro gathered _pasc_ meant something along the lines of, _Don’t worry so much, you paranoiac. It’s okay._ And Shiro, faced with no alternative, went with it. He tensed when the Olkari stranger reached out for his prosthetic, but Aransha was there again ( _Pasc, Shiro!_ ), so he gritted his teeth and said nothing as the Olkari fiddled with a dark nodule fastened to the casing.

The nodule released a puff of faintly glowing golden dust, and the Olkari nodded, then swiftly backed off and grabbed their spear. Aransha murmured something to the Olkari by her, then sighed.

“Shiro? Can you understand me?”

Shiro nearly went boneless with relief. “Yeah,” he said. “What was…?” He trailed off, frowning as he tried to move his prosthetic. It stirred feebly, but only lifted halfway to where he’d been aiming before it twitched and fell back to his side. “What did they do to my arm?”

“Inhibitor,” Aransha said. “I’m sorry. I’d heard that the Vivaskari are distrustful of inorganic machines. We always left them behind when we came to trade, so I didn’t realize...” She hummed, then said something to the Vivaskari that the translator left untouched.

The Olkari nearest Aransha responded in kind, a hint of laughter in her voice.

“They have made an exception for your translator, as no one here speaks your language, but they won’t let you have any other functioning tech during the talks.” Aransha glanced at the woman beside her. Lei-ree says you are welcome to hand your metal arm over to them until we leave, but she expects you are quite… attached to it.” Aransha made an unpleasant noise as Lei-ree laughed aloud. “I expect it didn’t come through the translation, but that was a pun.”

Shiro blinked, staring at Lei-ree, who remained wreathed in shadows, and smothered a smile. “The language they speak—my translator doesn’t seem to recognize it.”

“It wouldn’t,” said Aransha. “The Vivaskari shun technology, including the universal translator. You must learn their language the old-fashioned way, as a show of respect and earnestness.”

“You speak it, then?”

“I do.”

Shiro nodded. “Do you mind translating for me?”

“Not at all,” Aransha said.

“Good.” He turned to Lei-ree and inclined his head. “Thank you for coming, Lei-ree of the Vivaskari. Allow me to apologize for my rude welcome.”

Aransha translated into the lyrical language of the Vivaskari—not Karii, then, as the translator recognized Karii just fine. Shiro wondered what this language was called. Lei-ree responded in kind, gesturing broadly and pushing back her cowl as she stepped into the moonlight so Shiro had a full view of her grin.

“There is no need to apologize, lion-speaker,” Aransha translated. “Your instincts befit a warrior of your caliber.”

“Lion-speaker.” Shiro frowned. “You know of the Voltron Lions?”

“Voltron. That is a name we have not heard in many ages. The—ah...” Aransha faltered here, exchanging rapid words with Lei-ree. “Sorry,” she added, speaking now to Shiro. “I’m not familiar with the word she used there. Vivaskari lore is not something they share freely with visitors, and I’m afraid I can’t say exactly how they view Voltron. To paraphrase, ah—the legendary one has returned, then?”

Shiro nodded, first to Aransha, then to Lei-ree. “It has. That’s why we’re here, actually. To speak of Voltron, and of the Galra forces occupying Olkarion. Will you hear us out?”

“Aransha has shown us great respect in all our dealings,” Lei-ree said, through Aransha. “For her sake, we will hear what you have to say. But come. Let us go somewhere more comfortable to talk. Ne-ree!”

Shiro turned at the Olkari behind him snapped to attention. They exchanged a few brief words with Lei-ree, then disappeared into the forest on silent feet. Shiro fell in beside Aransha, following after Lei-ree.

“Sisters,” Aransha explained in response to Shiro’s unasked question. “I’ve worked with them before. Lei-ree is a merchant, but she holds great authority in this cell. Ne-ree is younger, but she heads their warriors. The Vivaskari consider that a rather low position to hold, but it will be at least as important for us to sway her as her sister.”

Shiro nodded, turning the situation over in his head as they walked. An ache was building at the base of his skull already, and they hadn’t even begun talks of alliance.

He wasn’t built for this. All the delicate words and diplomacy… this was Allura’s realm, not Shiro’s. He was a battlefield commander, more comfortable with action than with politics. Even this small delay itched at him, and the language barrier ignited a wordless frustration that made him restless. He breathed through it, keeping the ultimate goal in mind.

 _Patience yields focus,_ he told himself. _One step at a time._

He just hoped he hadn’t come all this way for nothing.

* * *

The problem with building a base in a series of caves set into the side of a cliff, it turned out, was that not all of these caves were built to withstand the level of activity the Olkari cell kept up. Their vehicles and other large machines vibrated the stone, and the Grove they’d grown up top over the last several years had altered the soil composition. In some cases, massive roots had punched straight through cave ceilings, sometimes damaging whatever was stored within.

The cell had suffered two minor cave-ins since moving back to this base, both of them isolated to chambers well away from the populated areas, which all had considerable reinforcement. More concerning was an older cave-in, which had completely blocked one of four entrances, as well as the only passage that connected to their main store of metal.

Olkari magic was a funny thing, Hunk was learning. They could, in theory, reshape any material, provided they knew its composition and it didn’t contain raw Quintessence. They could even, hypothetically, reshape people’s bodies—though considering the process was extremely painful and often fatal, it was considered something of a taboo.

Certain materials, however, didn’t take well to the Olkari arts. Plants were the most receptive to the changes, and most Olkari knew how to work with metal—not because of any particular affinity on the metal’s part, but more so because they found it versatile and had muddled their way through the inherent difficulties until it became second nature.

Stone, on the other hand, was not something they often shaped. It had apparently been an intermediate stage the Olkari people had passed through tens of thousands of years ago in the process of learning to work metal, much as humans had used bronze and iron before learning to forge steel.

They’d largely lost the art of stone manipulation—stone-speaking, as they called it—and could now only do very basic feats. Nothing on the scale of reopening collapsed tunnels, certainly. They’d been coming at this problem from every angle for the last few weeks—trying to manually dig out the collapsed tunnels, digging down from the surface using wood-speaking, even trying to trade with other rebel cells for metal they could use to make sturdier tools.

Shay had stumbled upon the collapsed tunnel by accident last night while exploring the base. Considering she’d lived in a series of tunnels all her life, she knew more about their maintenance than anyone else present, and had even dug out cave-ins on several occasions.

As such, the Olkari had asked her help in dealing with the collapse, and Shay had volunteered Hunk to help. (Not that Hunk was complaining. Shiro and the Olkari Elder were still off meeting with the forest-dwelling Vivaskari; Pidge, Lance, and Allura had yet to return from the castle, and Ryner was still sleeping after last night’s visit to the cult gathering had run late.)

A narrow ledge ran along the cliff-face from the large central entrance where the lions had entered to the mouth of the collapsed tunnel. Hunk shuffled along it, back pressed flush to the stone behind him, and tried to look at his footing and _not_ the hundred-foot drop beyond. If he’d known they were going to risk death to get over here, he would have taken an Ativan before they left.

Well… no, he wouldn’t, because he always worried about relying on them too much. There were bigger scares to deal with in the universe than a precarious path, and even though he had a generous supply of Ativan split between the castle, his lion, and his pockets, he didn’t want to start using it for any little thing.

Part of him knew he was being too hard on himself, but he couldn’t help it. It had been a colossal step to try anxiety meds in the first place; he’d been afraid they would change some fundamental part of him. Make him reckless and rude and ultimately erase the real Hunk in the process of creating a functional human being. He still felt stupid for thinking like that, sometimes, and he still felt like a weakling for needing medicine to help him live his life, and even now it was sometimes hard to break himself out of those self-deprecating loops.

He made it to the mouth of the other tunnel in one piece and took a minute to catch his breath, pressing one hand to his chest, where his heartbeat fluttered beneath his fingertips. Shay rubbed small circles on his back as she studied the destruction. Hunk appreciated the fact that she didn’t call attention to his minor panic, and her gentle touch—along with the energy boost of her Quintessence slipping into him—soothed away his lingering anxiety.

The cave-in was just about as bad as he’d expected, large chunks of rock and shattered support beams lying in a heap some thirty or forty feet into the tunnel. The entrance was considerably wider than the tunnel itself, like a hangar with a corridor leading off it. Hunk and Shay approached the cave-in cautiously while their Olkari guides hung back, standing off to one side.

“It will need better support structures,” Shay said, crouching down to feel the stone and soil filling the tunnel. “This material is not as sturdy as a Balmera’s carapace; it will never support its own weight.”

“They should probably reinforce the other tunnels, too,” Hunk said. The most populated sections of the base—the sleeping quarters, armory, and meeting rooms—were fully finished so they looked more like military bunkers than caves, but many of the other tunnels were held up with only wooden beams to serve as walls and ceilings.

Shay nodded thoughtfully. “If they mean to continue using this base, then yes, certainly. We will have to ask how feasible such a project is. It may take a long while to complete.”

“Yeah. For now, let’s figure out how to clear this mess.” Hunk paused, blowing out a long breath. The Olkari didn’t exactly have a lot in the way of heavy machinery. A few light, quick vehicles to get around to the other cells in the region, a couple of heavier offensive mecha-looking things. “I wonder if they found the cave system like this or if they expanded it.”

Shay shrugged, and Hunk turned toward the Olkari waiting off to the side, opening his mouth to ask whether they knew anything about the construction of these tunnels.

The Olkari’s eyes widened, and they stumbled back an instant before the ground shook with enough force to send Shay stumbling into Hunk. He twisted, trying to steady her, but he barely manged to keep his footing himself, and both of them ended up stumbling into the tunnel wall.

An abashed purr raced up Hunk’s legs, and he turned to find the Yellow Lion looming over him, her tail streaming out behind her, waving side-to-side in a lazy sweep that nearly reached the Olkari pressed up against the farthest corner of the cave opening.

“Uh...” Hunk glanced at Shay, then back up at Yellow. “Did you just…”

It wasn’t that the Lions were _incapable_ of moving around on their own. They all did it, roaming around their hangars and shifting positions to suit their mood. The Blue Lion was particularly active, charging in to wherever Lance was on more than one occasion, and she, along with Red and Black, had come to the paladins’ rescue as early as their first trip to Vel-17, when Lance, Matt, and Allura had been caught up in the teleportation zone created by zombie-like creatures known as the Ziva.

Yellow had never done anything like that. She guided Hunk in battle, sure, and she sat up and stretched when she was resting—but maneuvering out of the narrow mouth of the main cave entrance and finding Hunk and Shay on this smaller platform?

Yellow rumbled again, bringing her head around and nudging Hunk toward the wall where the Olkari stood. _Go,_ she said.

Hunk’s eyebrows crept up, but he glanced at Shay, and they both backed off, giving Yellow plenty of room to work. She crouched low, shimmied into the tunnel, and began to dig, carefully pulling out mounds of stone and wood and soil with her paw, pushing it back to where her back legs could reach it, and then shoving it unceremoniously off the edge of the cliff into the chasm below.

Crude, but effective. In less than half an hour, the tunnel was clear, and Yellow shuffled back out, purring in satisfaction. There were streaks of dust and reddish clay on her face and back, a handful of stones wedged between her claws. But she seemed utterly content as she lay down some distance away.

The Olkari approached the tunnel, murmuring in surprise and delight. Their amplifier gauntlets flared with light, and a few moments later there were rudimentary supports in place—enough to hold the tunnel until a larger team could come and put in more permanent reinforcements.

“Well, then.” Hunk crossed his arms. “I guess we’re done here. That was fast.”

Yellow purred.

Hunk grinned in response, trotting over to pet her chin. “You’re amazing, you know that? Best cat in the universe, yes you are. Yes, you are.”

Shay giggled, elbowing Hunk in the side as she joined him by Yellow. “Very impressive,” she agreed. “We will have to give you a good wash later.”

“Oh, definitely. For now, though, let’s fly back. No point going back across that lame excuse for a path, right?” He laughed nervously, but Shay just smiled, and Yellow dropped her head to let them both in.

The Blue Lion was just arriving as they made it back to the main chamber, and the other paladins—Shiro and Ryner excepted—were waiting. Matt had a pair of goggles pushed up atop his head. One of the Olkari had made them last night, saying they might help reduce the glare of Quintessence that had been giving Matt frequent headaches since the crystal flareup that had allowed him to see Quintessential currents.

Lance carried several food storage containers under his arm, and he eyed Yellow as he emerged but didn’t comment on her dusty appearance. Meanwhile Pidge raced ahead and reached up to pluck at Matt’s goggles, a teasing smirk on their lips. Matt rolled his eyes and gave them a shove, and they devolved into a wrestling match as Allura came down Blue’s ramp, Zuza at her side.

Val cocked her head to the side. “Zuza? What are you doing here?”

“I dunno.” Zuza scratched the back of her head and shuffled her feet. If Hunk didn’t know better, he’d have said she was blushing. “Felt like I should be doing something more.”

“She practically begged us to bring her along,” Pidge said. “I guess she’s been training against the gladiator when no one was looking.”

Zuza’s stubby ear flicked once, and she crossed her arms. “Hey, now. I’ve got plenty of combat training. It’s a little rusty, sure, but I don’t need a supervisor on the training deck.” She paused, glancing around at the rest of them. “Look, these guys were talking about the situation on the ground, and I figured you could use another body in the field. Okay?”

“Works for me,” Keith said. A grin tugged at his lips. “Though I don’t think it’s your brute strength—and I do mean that literally—that’s going to be the most useful.”

Zuza huffed, stalking over to Keith and reaching out like she meant to ruffle his fur. He grinned, darting behind Matt. Neither of them looked terribly impressive next to Zuza’s taller, broader frame, but Matt made a good show of shielding Keith from Zuza’s advances.

Lance eyed them--right up until Zuza waved him over, at which point he hastily turned away and lifted the containers he carried. "Hunk's mom made dessert!" he called. "She told me to tell you guys to save some for everyone, so you know. My job's done here." He pressed the containers into Hunk's hands and backed off, grinning as the other paladins began to inch toward Hunk, some with more subtlety than others.

“In any case,” Allura said. “How are things on the ground? Anything to report?”

“Ryner didn't say much last night,” Meri said. “But it sounds like she has another lead on the Cult of Lubos. She should be up soon to give a full report. Shiro’s still off looking for the Vivaskari.”

Allura nodded. “ Very well. Then let’s go see if we can find Ryner.”

* * *

Lei-ree brought them to a small hut deep in a thicket indistinguishable from the other fifty thickets they passed along the way. The hut seemed to be a permanent structure, with round walls and a thatch roof that blended impeccably with the foliage around it. The door swung aside on what Shiro first took for oiled hinges, but upon closer inspection he found they were vines—living plants that moved with the door and brought it silently back to its original position when Shiro, Aransha, and the Vivaskari sisters were gathered inside.

And what a sight it was. The hut was small, but it reminded Shiro of the _Persephone_ , every inch of room optimized for highest efficiency. There were food stores in one corner, next to a bed of coals and a wooden spigot over a stone basin. Beside that were vine hammocks, wooden chairs, a bookshelf, and an array of plants so precise Shiro doubted it was meant as an ordinary garden.

In fact, most of the walls were taken up with plants in wooden boxes or roped-off sections of bare soil. Considering the plant-based machines Ryner’s cell used, Shiro doubted these were here merely for ornamentation. Perhaps they served as communication with other Vivaskari, or played a role in the cell's defenses? He steered clear of them, just in case.

Lei-ree took a seat on one of the wooden chairs, Aransha quick to follow suit. Shiro hesitated a moment, as Ne-ree seemed disinclined to join them, but at a sharp look from Aransha, he sat in the third seat, forming a triangle with Aransha and Lei-ree. Aransha had fashioned him a sling for his prosthetic arm while they walked, reducing the strain of having its deadweight hanging from his shoulder, and he adjusted it now to keep the arm out of his way.

“So,” Lei-ree said, Aransha translating. “You come to speak to us of Zarkon.”

“Yes,” said Shiro. “I’m sure you know what he has done to Inanimasi, at least in part.”

Lei-ree’s lips twitched. Whatever she said drew Aransha’s face taut with fury, and rather than translate, she shot back in the same language. There was a bite to her words, but Lei-ree maintained that same vague smile, amusement shining in her eyes. With the light in here—several stands of what looked like luminescent moss scattered around the room—Shiro was finally able to pick out the details of her face. Her skin was more blue than the yellow-greens Shiro had seen among Ryner’s cell and the residents of the City, and her eyes contained flecks of red. Her antennae, too, were unusually long, curving around the back of her head like thin braids.

When the words finally petered out and Aransha sat back in her seat, fuming, Shiro leaned over. “What was that about?”

Aransha pursed her lips. “She says she’s heard rumors of what happened in the city—that we _let_ Zarkon take over. That we bowed to him willingly. I tried to tell her that’s not what happened, but she just laughed at me.”

“There is still resistance,” Shiro said, straightening up. He glanced at Ne-ree, who remained quiet, standing off to one side as though not to intrude. She was shorter than her sister, with broad shoulders and thick arms visible beneath her cloak, which was made of broad leaves sewn together. She returned his gaze coolly. “Some of the Inanimaskari fled when Zarkon took the city. Now that Voltron’s here, they’re ready to retake the city and drive Zarkon off your planet for good. But we’re going to need your help.”

“Our help.” Lei-ree crossed her arms, leaning back in her chair. “You will trade for our strength of arms?”

Shiro glanced helplessly at Aransha, who seemed to be struggling for calm. “We don’t have anything they want, and she knows it.”

“Zarkon’s presence here is a threat to you all,” Shiro said. “Your payment will be reclaiming your world from the Galra Empire.”

“An empire that has never done us any harm,” Lei-ree shot back. “The metal-speakers made their choices, and their hubris has come back to haunt them. That is not our concern.”

Shiro spread his hands wide. “You’re all Olkari,” he said. “Doesn’t that mean something? Anything?”

By the door, Ne-ree snorted. “We are few, lion-speaker,” she said. “And this war would cut deeply. If we do nothing, we will continue as we always have. Perhaps we have lost the trade of the metal-speakers, but we do not need them to survive. If we fight, many of us will die needlessly.”

“And if you don’t, this rebellion is doomed to fail,” Shiro said.

Lei-ree shrugged. “Then do not fight. No one is compelling you.”

Aransha clenched her hands on her knees, leaning forward. She spoke earnestly, almost desperately, and when she had finished she waited, hopeful. Lei-ree only waved a hand. Sighing, Aransha bowed her head.

“I told them why we must fight—that our people are suffering, that many are trapped in the city who did not agree to Zarkon’s rule.” Aransha shook her head. “I don’t think it’s going to sway them. They are cautious by nature. With as small as their cells tend to be, they must be. One cell joining us will do nothing except get all their warriors killed along with ours; they know that.”

Shiro nodded. “They won’t agree unless we give them a compelling enough reason that all the other Vivaskari cells will join the fight, too—is that right?”

“That about sums it up.”

“Right.” Shiro sat up straighter, hands on his thighs. He caught Lei-ree’s eye and held it, unblinking. “You don’t know what the Empire is capable of,” he said, hardly hearing Aransha as she began to translate. “I do. I’ve seen how they work first hand. They will not be content with just the City. Once they’ve bled it dry, they’ll come for you.”

Lei-ree opened her mouth to respond, but Shiro didn’t wait.

“They have a weapon. _Had_ a weapon. We destroyed it once, but I have no doubt they’re building a new, more powerful model.” Shiro licked his lips, remembering another planet withering to dust, Quintessence signatures winking out on a display screen as Shiro and Keith looked on in horror. “They can drain a planet of all Quintessence.”

Aransha’s voice faltered as he said this, and she stared at him, the color draining from her face. He met her eyes and nodded, and, stammering, she finished her translation.

The effect was instantaneous. Lei-ree tensed, her skin turning a curious gray, and she looked over at Ne-ree, who had taken a step forward, her hand going toward a pouch at her waist. She stopped herself before opening it, but it was obvious she was shaken. They both were.

Shiro hated to take advantage of their fear, but he needed to be sure they understood the stakes here. “The people in the City are suffering under Zarkon’s rule. Some of them are complicit, yes, but most are innocent victims. We mean to free them. We’re _going_ to free them. But we only have one shot at this. If we fail, the best you can hope for is that Zarkon executes anyone he suspects of having worked with us, and when that leaves him short a few thousand engineers, he’s going to push harder than ever to track you down and force you to work for him.

“At worst, we come too close to winning, we spook Zarkon, and he unleashes Haggar’s weapon on this planet, killing everyone and everything on it.”

Lei-ree was still ashen, but she collected herself enough to lean forward her antennae twitching, the motion reminiscent of a waving banner. “We have only twelve warriors in our cell. Our strength will not change the tide of this battle.”

“No,” Shiro said, “but if all the cells come together? How many Vivaskari live in the forest, Lei-ree? How many of them are warriors? A thousand? Ten thousand? More?” He shook his head. “Speak with the other cells. Tell them what I told you. Ask them if this is a risk they are willing to take. Even if only half the cells agree to fight, it could very well add up to an army—an army Zarkon doesn’t know to look for.” He paused, searching their faces. They seemed shaken, but they nodded along with what he was saying. “If you need proof of my claims, I can get it for you. Otherwise… please. Just speak with the other cells. I won’t ask you to promise more right now.”

Lei-ree folded her shaking hands in her lap and glanced at her sister, who looked ready for battle.

Ne-ree met Shiro’s eyes and nodded once. “We will do what we can.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Karii translations, listed chronologically:  
> *O besvataum auk ozhahi diniti newo. - You’re rather observant for one with such little eyes. (This line is actually spoken in Vivaskarii, which is a distinct language from Karii but belongs to the same language family.)  
> *Neht vas punvata. Vask neht ohl ininita. - Don’t fight them. They aren’t our enemies.  
> *Pasc, Shiro. Vak o aul prece. - Peace, Shiro. She’s a friend.


	12. The Inner Sanctum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Shiro and Aransha found the leaders of a Vivaskari cell and asked for aid in their fight against the Galra troops stationed in the capital, but Lei-ree and her sister, Ne-ree were less than enthusiastic. Meanwhile, Akira threw a party for the Guard, Yellow dug out a collapsed tunnel, Zuza joined the paladins down on Olkarion, and the loss of Altea finally caught up with Coran.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Suz sent me an ask about how Meri found out humans drink ethanol for fun, and that accidentally turned into a sidestory, so if you haven't already seen it... [have fun!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13346361)
> 
> No specific warnings in this chapter except for a discussion of anxiety and related self-esteem issues that I wrote after dealing with a long and draining bout of anxiety myself.

_Ryner ran through the streets of Inanimasi, robes flapping around her ankles. She slammed into someone coming out of a shop, cursed, and reached out to steady them before continuing on her way. She reached into her pocket and tapped her cube, which read out the time—five minutes late already._

_She careened around the next turn and plunged into one of the smaller gardens set up around the capitol. The stench of the flowers overpowered her even before she passed under the silver filigree arch at the entrance to the garden, and she wrinkled her nose. She normally avoided places like this, but this was the fastest route to the palace, and she needed to shave off all the time she could. Why did her physics professor have to go long today of all days?_

_Around her, children shrieked and shouted and waded into the pool nestled beneath the trees at one end of the garden. Others shoved their faces into flowers, antennae quivering with delight._

_Ryner had never understood people’s fascination with the messy, imprecise world of plants, but there was no time now to search for answers. She just ran, narrowly avoiding another collision as she exited back to the street. The crown of Lubos’ palace rose above the nearest buildings, the indistinct sound of an amplified voice echoing off the walls._

_When she turned the next corner she stumbled upon the outer edges of a crowd that had spilled out past the courtyard behind the palace, shutting down the whole street. King Lubos’ voice rang out above the murmur of the crowd, but Ryner was still too far away to make out more than the occasional phrase. She began to shove her way forward, finding gaps in the crowd she could fill. An enormous holographic screen rose above the first tier of the palace, showing Lubos on his dais with a middle-aged Olkari man._

_Ryner had never seen the man before, but she knew who he was. The whole City knew who he was. Iker, an engineer from Fourth Academic. He’d pioneered a new technique for shaping metal that had paved the way for massive advancements in construction of ships, buildings, and a new transit line that shaved an entire varga off the Southern Loop._

_The crowd got denser the nearer Ryner pressed to the front, and she almost got stuck on the northern edge of the courtyard before spotting an opening where a father had just lifted his child onto his shoulders._

_Ryner darted forward, and then, through a gap in the crow, she spotted him—King Lubos, resplendent in his gold-trimmed robes. He stood on the dais at the front of the courtyard, a platform raised to the level of Ryner’s shoulder. He smiled as he finished lauding Iker’s achievements and turned his gaze out over the crowd._

_For just an instant, Lubos’ eyes fell on Ryner. It was like a full power core had just discharged into her veins, and she stood rigid, unable to gather herself enough even to bow her head or give some other sign of respect. She just stared back at her king, awed and not a little starstruck, until he strode to the other end of the dais and she had to go up on her toes to follow him._

_Lubos. He was more than a king, really. He was a presence. A master of the arts, who had proven himself worthy on the day he claimed his throne. Olkarion did not have a single royal line, but rather three, each masters of their own techniques. Each royal line raised an heir, and once every ten decaphebes, they could challenge the sitting monarch to a feat of engineering with the winner claiming the crown._

_Lubos had been a young man when he challenged King Veran and won, and he’d defended his reign through eight challenges--four from each line--since. He was, without a doubt, the best of the Olkari, and as he turned to pin an emerald to Iker’s robe, Ryner’s heart clenched._

One day, _she thought,_ that’s going to be me standing up there shaking the king’s hand.

One day the whole world will know my name.

* * *

Shiro returned late that night, his face betraying disappointment. Allura shoved aside a surge of indignation and joined him, offering one of the pastries Hunk’s mother had sent along. The other paladins had already destroyed most of the care package, but Hunk had set aside several of what he identified as Shiro’s probable favorites.

Not for the first time, Allura was impressed with Hunk’s instincts, for although none of them had seen anything like these deserts since Allura had emerged from stasis, Shiro’s eyes lit up at the sight of them.

“Are those…?”

“Hunk’s mother sent a care package,” Allura explained, handing Shiro the open container. “We saved some for you.”

Ignoring the cookies, Shiro went straight for one of Hunk’s choices, something he’d called a croissant. He melted at the first bite, lifting a hand to catch the crusty flakes that broke off.

“Was I right?” Hunk asked, scrubbing at an oil spot on his cheek. He’d been working on the lions when Shiro returned—cleaning out some greenery that had gotten caught in joints during the descent. He cocked his head to the side as Shiro took another bite. “You’re a pastry person, yeah? Tend toward savory, but you like dark chocolate or fruit fillings too? The other croissant has a dark chocolate swirl, by the way.”

Shiro raised his half-eaten croissant in salute, though he glanced at the second croissant contemplatively. “What’s the rest of it?”

“Slice of banana bread, couple of shortbread cookies. There’s some cheese tarts in the Olkari equivalent of a fridge.”

Shiro raised an eyebrow at that as he finished the croissant.

“There’s a stream deeper in the caves,” Hunk explained. “The water runs pretty cold, so the Olkari made some water-tight storage cubes and leave them in the water if they have food they need to keep chilled. They don’t use it a lot—they’re like, ninety percent vegetarians, and they just gather what they need each day.”

“Huh.” Shiro hesitated, grabbed one of the shortbread cookies, and put the lid back on the container. “Are the others still up? We should talk strategy tonight, if we can.”

Allura nodded. “They’re all eager to move forward. Hunk, would you mind--?”

“Already on it,” Hunk said, raising his hand as he turned and headed for the nearest cave entrance. “I’ll get everyone together in the main meeting room.”

“We’ll join you shortly.” Allura watched Hunk go, then turned to Shiro. “You should probably leave that in the lion, or somebody else might snap them up.” Shiro chuckled at that, but he took her advice, stowing the container of sweets in one of the compartments in Black’s cockpit. That done, they turned together to follow after Hunk. “I take it the Vivaskari won’t be lending us their aid?”

Shiro blew out a long breath, raking his hands through his hair. “It wasn’t a flat no, but… It could have gone better for sure. I told the leaders of one of the cells about Haggar’s weapon—the one that drains planets’ Quintessence—so they do at least realize that the Empire is a threat to all Olkari, not just the ones in the City. But they’re still hesitant. Which I get. Each of their cells is pretty small, and they can’t afford to send all their warriors to die in someone else’s battle. They were going to speak with some of the other cells. Maybe if they convince enough cells, they’ll put together a force to send our way.”

“We can only hope,” Allura said.

Nearly everyone was waiting by the time Shiro and Allura reached the meeting room. Hunk appeared a moment later with Lance and Val. Allura scanned the room to make sure everyone was there—all twelve paladins, Zuza, Elder Aransha, and Joska and Zori, the two Olkari guards who had accompanied Ryner on her infiltration into the Cult gathering.

“All right,” Shiro said. “As Aransha may have already told you, we made contact with the Vivaskari earlier today. They’re wary of getting involved in a war, but they’re discussing it among themselves. Aransha will be in touch with them again, but for now we have to move forward with our own plans. He glanced at Ryner and Allura.

“The Cult of Lubos is going to be a major issue,” Ryner said. “Even if we drive the Galra out, they’ll still have a hold on my people through the Cult.”

“And if ‘Lubos’ orders his followers to fight us,” Zori added, “they will, no question.”

“So we’ll have to undermine the Cult’s authority in the city before we begin our open assault,” Shiro said.

Allura nodded. “We’ll want to send several teams into the city to prepare. One to find a way to tear down the Cult, one to get in touch with the resistance in Inanimasi.”

“We’ll have to deal with the sentries, too,” Shiro said. “There may not be a lot of them, but with a city as densely populated as this one, we need to take steps to minimize civilian casualties.”

“And the Cult patrols,” Lance said. “Once we make our move, there’s going to be mass panic—on both sides. We may not be able to avoid killing some of the cultists, but we can try to avoid a direct confrontation between the two sides.”

“A distraction?” Pidge asked.

Val put her feet up on the edge of the table, leaning back in her chair. “Tell them there’s a riot somewhere we’ve already cleared of civilians, then trap them there?”

“It would be difficult to set up an ambush of that scale even once,” Ryner said. “If you’re trying to neutralize every Cult patrol in the city...”

“The City’s way too big,” Lance said. He crossed his arms, scowling.

It wasn’t a bad idea, though. Not feasible on a large scale, but for the heart of Galra power? If they mobilized resistance fighters to help drive the Galra out, the fighting would be concentrated in the capitol. It would be a good idea to clear out as many of the patrols as possible so the attackers could strike right at the heart of Zarkon’s power.

“All right,” Allura said. “We’ll continue to refine the plans regarding the patrols, as we won’t need to deal with them until just before the battle begins. Right now, we have two priorities: find the resistance in the City so we can coordinate with them on the attack, and infiltrate the Cult of Lubos to find something that can undermine their power with the populace.”

Shiro nodded. “So let’s talk teams.”

* * *

The strategy meeting lasted well into the night, and Hunk honestly couldn’t remember most of it. Shiro, Allura, Ryner, and Lance were heading up each of the four teams headed into the city, each of which had their own goal. Hunk and Shay were going to be paired with Shiro, and they were supposed to track down the resistance.

The resistance that Ryner’s cell had been trying to find for eight years with no luck. Aransha had said something about new leads, and Shiro seemed confident in their odds of success, but Hunk couldn’t help feeling like it was a futile effort.

They contacted Coran when they were done, updating him on the situation and letting him know that they would be in the city the next day. If everything went well, they would be in and out with no problems, but Allura wanted Coran and the Guard to be ready in case they needed to step up their battle plans. Wyn, who had apparently taken a shift on the bridge with Coran, had promised to come in guns blazing the second things went wrong, and Coran had laughed, patting Wyn's head and promising Allura they wouldn't do anything hasty.

Hunk slept poorly that night, his dreams fraught with Olkari patrols and Galra sentries that recognized the paladins of Voltron sneaking around the City. They opened fire again and again, but they never shot at Hunk. They shot civilians instead—sometimes Olkari, sometimes human, sometimes Balmeran—and Hunk was never fast enough to save them.

By the time morning came around, his stomach had tied itself in knots. He forced himself to eat a few handfuls of a granola-like mixture of dried fruit, seeds, and some kind of crisp grain. The Olkari always seemed to have some lying around, and they carried little wafers of the stuff as travel rations. It was bland enough not to aggravate his nausea, but he still couldn’t force down more than a few bites before he left to go see if Yellow was ready for the flight. She wouldn’t be able to enter the city, of course, but they wanted to have a few lions nearby in case things got bad. That meant Yellow, who could dig them a cave in the mountainside, and Green and Red, the smallest lions.

There were no pre-flight checks do be done that Yellow couldn’t run herself, and Hunk had already checked and re-checked all her systems last night while he was waiting for Shiro to return, but being near her helped calm the tremor in his hands.

“This is big,” he murmured as he buffed some little scratches out of her hull. “Like, _big_ , big. If today goes well, we might actually stand a chance of freeing Olkarion. If it doesn’t...”

Images from his dreams returned in force, unsettling the meager breakfast he’d managed to choke down. He grabbed a water packet he’d left sitting nearby and drank to wash away the bile taste rising in his throat.

Failure wasn’t an option today. They were going to go in there, find the rebels, and make some plans, all without alerting the enemy to their presence. They were going to do that, because they didn’t have any other choices.

Hunk waited until his stomach settled before fishing out his Ativan and swallowing one. It felt like admitting defeat.

“I thought I would find you here.”

Hunk turned, shoving his bottle of Ativan back into his pocket as though the whole team didn’t already know about it. Heat began to creep up his neck, but he forced a smile for Shay, who lingered a moment in the mouth of the tunnel, head cocked to the side as she studied him, before joining him beside Yellow.

"Hey,” he said, voice shaking just a little. The Ativan took time to take effect, and Shay’s surprise arrival wasn’t helping his shakes. He felt like someone had let a canary loose in his chest, the fluttering of his heart so intense it was starting to make him feel light-headed. He glanced nervously at the tunnel. “Everyone else on their way, then?”

“Soon,” Shay said. She stopped near him, watched him for a moment, then turned her attention to Yellow, pressing a palm to the underside of the lion’s chin and humming a tuneless melody. “You have taken your Ativan.”

Shame closed in around Hunk’s throat, but he nodded, fingering the bottle in his pocket.

Shay’s song turned mournful, and though she kept her eyes closed, Hunk knew she had turned her attention his way. “Is something wrong, Hunk?”

“Nothing,” he said quickly. But Yellow prodded at his mind, and though Hunk knew she wouldn’t deliberately betray his irrational fears to Shay, none of them would be able to avoid some of it seeping into the bond. “It’s just—I should be better than this.”

“This?”

“My anxiety,” Hunk said. “I know it’s not my fault—I _know_ it's not, but I can’t help it. I’ve had plenty of time to get used to the life of a paladin. I shouldn’t _need_ medication to be able to function out there. No one else is like this.”

Shay frowned. “We all have our demons, Hunk. We all, I think, wish we could have lived some other life. I know I do.”

“But that’s the thing.” Hunk spread his hands wide, the canary in his chest sinking in its talons. His voice shook traitorously, and he had to blink to stop his vision from blurring. “You hate violence, Shiro and Matt have PTSD from everything they've been through...everyone has a reason to be messed up about the things we have to do, but everyone else has figured out a way to deal with it. You’re all strong.”

Shay gave a start, turning toward the door, and Hunk’s stomach dropped as he saw that Meri had joined them.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

Hunk rubbed the back of his hand beneath his nose, sniffling as he turned back to Yellow. There was a headache building behind his eyes now, and he was sure he’d be feeling the effects of this emotional storm in a few hours, but he tried not to let it show. “It’s fine.”

Meri sighed, her footsteps light as she approached. She rested a hand on his back and leaned on his shoulder. “You're strong, too, you know.”

Hunk tensed, starting to pull away, but Meri’s hand slid up to his shoulder and squeezed.

“You are. Strength isn’t about not ever struggling. It’s about struggling, and then moving forward anyway.” Meri tilted her head back to look up at the Yellow Lion. “We’re all broken, Hunk, and shoving it down and not dealing with it isn’t something to be proud of.”

“It is if it means you can do your job.”

Meri laughed, the sound mournful. It made Hunk’s heart clench—but it was sympathy, not pity, Meri was offering, and it eased the vice around his throat. “I spent more than a decade on Earth hiding from my problems. I watched almost everyone I loved die, and then I ran away for a chance to see Allura and Coran again. If you’d been there back then, you wouldn’t think I was strong. I was terrified and exhausted, and all I wanted to do was cry. So I locked myself in a cryopod and pretended that time counted as part of the grieving process.”

Shay looped her arm around Hunk and latched onto Meri’s shoulder.

Meri smiled at her, the expression a little lopsided. “Don’t expect yourself to be perfect, Hunk, because none of us is. We’re all just trying to get by. Your Ativan isn’t a weakness—it’s a tool like any other. Just like the lions, or the comms, or the bayards. You wouldn’t tell someone they’re weak because they equip themselves for battle with the best armor. So don’t try and say you’re lesser than the rest of us because you need medication to bring your brain chemistry back in line.”

The guilt still crawled beneath his skin, but with Shay on one side and Meri on the other and Yellow lowering her chin to rest atop them all, Hunk was able to breathe a little easier. Maybe that was the Ativan beginning to take effect, or maybe it was just his friends' quiet understanding reminding him he wasn’t alone.

“You’ve got this, Hunk,” Meri said. “Don’t let the anxiety tell you otherwise.”

He lifted a hand to pat Yellow’s chin as she purred her agreement, and smiled at Meri. It wasn't as easy as flipping a switch and silencing his anxiety, of course, but he could choose to listen to Meri, to repeat her words to himself as many times as it took to make them sound like truth. He was strong. He wasn't perfect, but he didn't have to be. He was trying.

Baby steps.

“You’re right,” he said, sniffling again. “Thanks.”

“Of course.” Meri threaded her other arm around him and squeezed, her Altean strength catching him off guard as his feet lifted off the ground. “That’s what I’m here for.”

* * *

Hunk’s nerves had settled by the time they were in the air, and all that remained was a touch of embarrassment as Shay slipped inside his head. She radiated understanding, but Hunk couldn’t help feeling foolish for his sudden attack of self-doubt.

Even that faded as they reached the foothills outside Inanimasi, where Yellow set to work carving out a small cave. Green crowded in beside her, the two lions packed so tightly they could barely lower their heads to the ground without banging into each other. The paladins emerged, along with Joska, who was coming with Hunk, Shay, and Shiro to seek out the resistance, and Zori, who joined Ryner, Pidge, and Meri in the team that would infiltrate Lubos’s palace.

Hunk wished them the best of luck—them and the other two teams, who had the comparatively easy task of scoping out the guard patrols in preparation for their eventual strike.

“Remember to check in every hour,” Shiro said. “As long as nothing changes, we’ll meet back here at dusk.”

The paladins answered with a round of nods, and then they were off, each group taking a different route down to the city. They would all enter at different points, and only Ryner and Lance’s groups were going to the capitol. Allura, Keith, and Matt had taken Red farther south, where they would target the control tower for the sentries stationed in one of the major tech circuits.

Hunk soon lost sight of the other teams, between the trees and the steep slopes, but the City loomed ahead of them, and there was no time to worry about what danger the Cult of Lubos posed to his friends. Aransha’s information put the highest rate of rebel activity in the Second Administrative Circuit _,_ a densely-populated borough just north of the capitol. While most of the actual governing happened in the capitol proper, a lot of the record-keeping got outsourced to neighboring circuits. From Aransha’s descriptions, the Second Administrative Circuit, Sec-Admin, was like a DMV on the scale of a small city, interspersed with apartment buildings, town houses, libraries, and the various necessities of day-to-day life.

It was a fitting home base for the resistance that was trying to de-legitimize Galra rule, but it was still a _lot_ of ground to cover.

“Stay close,” Joska whispered as they boarded a transit to Sec-Admin. “This is one of the busiest circuits in the central basin, so as long as you don’t go looking for trouble, we shouldn’t have a problem getting lost in the crowd—just make sure you don’t lose _each other_.”

Hunk folded himself into one of the seats, his legs cramped as he tried not to encroach too much on Shiro’s leg room. The transit wasn’t made for long legs, evidently, despite many of the Olkari being six feet or more. Then again, once Joska sat it was evident her height wasn’t from long legs so much as a long torso and neck. The transit filled up quickly, and still people packed in, crowding the center aisle and squeezing two to a seat. It should have made Hunk feel more comfortable, especially after Joska’s assessment, but instead he only felt vaguely claustrophobic.

Soon enough, they were back in open air, and Hunk breathed a little easier. He kept his hood up as they navigated the crowded streets, grateful for the light drizzle that started soon after they exited the transit. The paladins were far from the only people wearing cloaks here, and few people glanced their way as Joska took them to the licensing complex Aransha had identified as a likely point of contact.

“We haven’t made it this far yet,” Joska admitted, pulling them into a queue at one of the counters. “We wanted to send out one more surveillance team before we acted on our information, but I don’t honestly think we’d have found out anything new.”

“You think the reports are right, then?” Shiro asked.

“Pretty sure. There’s always a risk, of course, but we’ll just have to take it slow. I’ll do the talking and you...” She hesitated, shuffling closer to the counter as the line moved. “You just be ready to get us out of here if things go bad.”

* * *

Lubos’ palace was bigger than Pidge had been expecting. _Way_ bigger. Any one of the lions would have fit comfortably inside. Hell, with a little bit of crouching Voltron themself might have fit. But it wasn’t the height that made the structure impressive. It was tall, but not outrageously so: a ziggurat with eight tiers of five or so levels, each tier topped by a colorful garden. The upper tiers shrank comparatively little with each step, giving the palace the look of a gleaming white metal tower.

The lowest tier, though—the lowest tier was _massive_. It must have covered half a dozen city blocks, at least, with dozens of entrances spaced along the exterior. Most of these were shut tight, security cameras blinking an ominous red above each door. Pidge tried to count the doors they passed, but they gave up after forty as more important questions pressed at them. Namely, how they were going to get inside the palace.

Ryner, of course, had the medallion the prophet Ane had given her at the gathering two nights ago. That would get her in, hopefully along with Zori and Meri, who had already adopted an Olkari form. It had been fascinating to watch the change. They’d stopped in the border circuit, taking some time to watch cultist patrols until Meri identified an officer of some kind. She’d scrunched her face up, shifting through the crowd to get a better angle, and then finally returned to the cafe where they’d claimed a table wearing the face of the cultist officer.

 _I won_ _’t be able to mimic his voice,_ Meri had warned. _But hopefully this gives us a leg up._

That remained to be seen, but regardless of how the conversation at the front door went, Pidge was on their own. Lubos’ prophets wouldn’t just overlook a human teenager claiming to be a loyal cultist recruit—especially considering invitations to the palace seemed to depend on skill in the Olkari arts.

“Plenty of vents on the exterior walls,” Pidge muttered, slouching as they kept pace between Ryner and Meri, their eyes fixed on the palace. “But I’m going to have less than no cover if I come at it head-on.”

Meri hummed. “Distraction?” she asked. “Or come in from the rooftop of a neighboring building?”

“I don’t want to take the time to scope out the other buildings,” Pidge said, cursing themself for not spending more time fiddling with the lions’ cloaking devices. They had yet to figure out a way to make the generators portable, but they were sure it was possible. It had to be; they’d just dedicated their time to other pursuits.

“Distraction it is.” Meri glanced around, then altered her face, adding more yellow to her skin and growing a second pair of antennae. She whipped off her cloak and handed it to Zori, then jerked her chin toward the palace wall. “Get ready.”

Pidge nodded, tugging their hood lower as they meandered into the flower beds that lined the street. There weren’t real paths in here; it was obviously meant to be ornamental, and to keep people away from the palace. But Pidge walked with a confident stride, pace brisk, as though this were a public park they were cutting through to shave a few seconds off their walk home. They didn’t lift their head far enough to make it obvious their destination was the palace itself, but turned parallel to the wall, attention honed on a vent ahead of them.

Meri’s shout kicked up right on cue—a cry of surprise, a strangled curse, and an indignant cry of, “Hey! That guy just stole my purse!”

Pidge glanced over their shoulder just long enough to see several passersby swivel toward Meri and a startled Olkari who held up his hands, protesting his innocence. Meri kept up her tirade, and Pidge spun back toward the wall, summoning their bayard and pulling themself up toward the air vent. They pulled out an Altean multitool and quickly removed three of the corner screws on the vent cover. It swung loose from the final screw, and Pidge shimmied inside, maneuvering the cover back into place as Meri’s argument with the supposed pickpocket descended into shoving, several other Olkari stepping in to pull the two apart.

Pidge wedged the three loose screws through the grating of the vent cover, their heads resting on the bottom edge of the duct so the cover stayed approximately in its intended position. It wasn’t a perfect fix, but with the vent ten feet off the ground, it should cover Pidge’s tracks long enough for them to get what they’d come for and get out.

“I’m in,” they whispered, activating their comms and their helmet’s built-in flashlight as they slithered deeper into the vents.

“Good.” Ryner sounded breathless, her words tumbling out in a rush. “Meri’s just finishing up her… performance. We’ll be at the door soon.”

Pidge grunted acknowledgment, pausing by a vent to look down on the room below, which seemed to be a workspace of some sort. Scrap metal and electronic devices littered the countertops lining the walls. A pair of cultists in violet-trimmed white robes hovered over one such device, conversing in low tones. Pidge watched for a time, taking a few still images with the camera in their gauntlet, and listened to the murmured conversation on the other end of the comms.

“Prophet Ane,” Ryner said. “She gave me this at a gathering two nights ago and told me to come here.”

A jumble of indistinct words followed, presumably questioning Meri and Zori’s presence.

“She said it was okay,” Meri said, sounding impressively confused. “We only needed one medallion?”

The guards conferred for another moment, and then Ryner breathed a sigh of relief so faint the comms only barely picked it up. “We made it,” she whispered a few seconds later. “Let’s find somewhere we can talk.”

* * *

“That’s an hour,” Shiro muttered, switching his comms to the open channel. The Olkari behind him in line snorted, possibly taking Shiro’s comment for a complaint about the length of the wait at this licensing office. (Indeed, they’d hardly made it ten feet in the last fifteen minutes, despite this building, with dozens of clerks, being dedicated exclusively to business licensing.) Shiro shifted forward, nodding his thanks as Hunk began to gripe about the slow clerks just loud enough to mask Shiro’s words. “Everyone, checks.”

“Located a command center for this circuit,” Keith said. “We’re evaluating our options.” The way he said it suggested that he—and likely Matt, as well—were fully on board with a direct assault, and Allura had vetoed that plan.

“Good. Remember, observation is your primary goal for today. Upload the kill switch if you can, but don’t take any unnecessary risks.” Keith sighed, but grunted an affirmation, and Shiro smiled. “Next?”

“A-okay over here,” Lance said. “We’re just familiarizing ourselves with the capitol at this point, making note of things we might be able to use to our advantage. No problems so far.”

Shiro nodded. “Ryner?”

“We’re in.” It was Pidge who spoke, their voice low enough that it came through with some distortion as the comms tried to compensate for the volume. “The others are in the open and can’t talk. I’m in the vents. No one seems suspicious. Yet.”

“Just be careful,” Allura said.

“Hey. You’re dealing with professionals. I mean, hell, Meri’s like some sort of super spy down there. Probably already memorized a guard’s face in case we run into trouble.”

Meri grunted, but didn’t seem to be denying it.

The line moved, and Shiro shuffled forward. As slow as progress was, the sheer number of open windows kept the line short. Another fifteen minutes, and they should be at the front of the line. “We’re at the contact point,” Shiro said. “Just… waiting in line now.”

“Man,” Matt muttered. “I am _so_ glad I didn’t draw the short straw on this one.”

“No.” There was a grin in Pidge’s voice. “You get to go in there and smash shit up while the rest of us have to worry about things like ‘tact’ and ‘stealth.’”

Allura sighed. “There will be no smashing. On any front.”

The line shifted again, and Shiro suppressed laughter as Keith and Pidge both grumbled about Allura’s orders. “All right, keep up the good work, everyone. I’ll call again in an hour.” He waited a moment for the others to acknowledge, then switched his comms back to local as a window opened up.

Joska led them forward, hands shaking slightly as she crossed her arms on the counter and leaned in close to the window. Shiro stood beside her, eyes roving along the area visible beyond the row of windows. Computers, data pads, and wall displays showing guidelines and annotated forms gave the office an orderly air, though the frantic Olkari rushing about undermined it somewhat.

“Hello there, uh.” The Olkari behind the desk faltered as he glanced at Shiro. He could hardly fail to notice Shiro’s species at this range, and his eyes darted past Shiro and Joska to Hunk and Shay, who lingered a few steps back, nervously watching the room.

Shiro shifted subtly, though he doubted the clerk was hiding a weapon under the counter.

The clerk cleared his throat and spread his hands on the counter. “Sorry. How can I help you?”

“We’re here on internal business,” Joska said, voice low but firm. “Is there anyone in Personnel today?”

“Uh… I’m not sure.” The clerk frowned, staring at the four of them one last time before he pushed his chair back. “Give me just a moment and I’ll check for you.”

“We would appreciate that.”

Shiro waited for the man to disappear through a door in the back wall before leaning toward Joska and whispering, “Personnel. That’s our contact?”

“That’s who everyone we’ve pegged as potential resistance workers has asked for.” Joska licked her lips, antennae quivering. “We haven’t been able to get anyone into the back room to hear what happens next—but it’s not like people come through here every day. We could wait another two movements before we get a chance to observe another meeting.”

“Then we’ll just have to improvise.”

Hunk let out a low, anxious laugh at that, but just then the clerk reappeared, bobbing his head as he opened the nearest gate and waved the group into the back. “Irati’s waiting for you. This way.”

Shiro’s heart pounded as they followed the clerk to a back office. He’d faced down aliens twice his size, spit in druids’ faces, and _this_ was what scared him? A meeting with HR? He almost had to laugh at that, and it was with some trepidation that he watched the clerk close the office door behind him as he retreated back to his station.

The woman who sat behind the desk had a commanding presence, her wrinkles giving her the appearance of a perpetual scowl. Her antennae—she had only the upper pair—were trapped against her scalp by a silvery band that matched the necklace she wore. Both stood out against her deep blue-green skin, like armor worn over fine silks.

She arched an eyebrow at the sight of her visitors. “Internal affairs?” she asked dryly.

Joska faltered, reaching into an inner pocket for the cube Aransha had given her. She hesitated for a moment, passing the cube back and forth from one hand to the other while she studied Irati—debating the validity of their intel, no doubt. But Joska herself had said it: time was short, and they had no better leads. With a deep breath, she set the cube on the table and slid it toward Irati.

The woman’s expression didn’t change. She stared Joska down for a long moment, then reached out without breaking eye contact and activated the cube. A map of the forest appeared in the air above the cube, rotating slowly. There were no markers on the map, no indication of its significance, but Irati’s eyes widened nevertheless. She stared, stunned, at the cube, then caught herself and deactivated it.

This time when she looked up at Shiro and the others, her eyes were more calculating. “I have a feeling this is going to be a long conversation. What do you say we all go get some tea?”

* * *

“I found some sort of classroom or something.” Pidge’s voice on the comms grew tight on the last word, and a pair of sneezes followed, bursting as loud as laserfire in Ryner’s ear. “Frickin’ dust,” they muttered. “Bright side: I don’t think this place sees a lot of visitors.”

“Perfect,” Meri said. “Which way do we go?”

Pidge sniffled. “Give me a sec… Okay. Keep going the way you’re headed now. You’ll be turning left in about a hundred feet.”

Zori picked up his pace, his unease rising to the surface as their footsteps echoed in the air around them. The corridors in this section of the palace were deserted, only a handful of voices drifting out from the rooms they passed, the overwhelming majority of which were dark and silent. The three of them had slipped their escort easily enough, the poor man too tired to pay them much mind.

Meri grabbed Zori by the hand to slow him, frowning when he shot her a petulant look. “Control,” she said in a low voice. “You belong here. Believe that, or your enemies never will.”

Zori stared at her, antennae sloping backward in confusion.

"Trust me," Meri said. "This isn't my first rodeo."

"Rodeo...?"

“Almost there,” Pidge said. “Should be the next left, then it’s a straight shot to where I am. Maybe—”

Ryner didn’t hear the rest of what Pidge said as footsteps from ahead split the silence. Zori froze, Meri dropping into a defensive stance. Ryner, too, reached for her weapon, but stopped herself before she could draw it. _You belong here._ She patted the pouch at her waist where she’d stowed Ane’s medallion and breathed in deeply.

“Go,” she hissed to Meri and Zori, giving Zori a gentle shove toward the corridor Pidge had indicated. “Find Pidge. See what you can learn.”

Zori was already shaking his head. “I’m not leaving you.”

“Yes, you are,” Meri said. She grabbed him by the collar, hoisting him nearly off his feet. His eyes bulged, breath rasping as his robes pulled tight around his neck, and he scrambled to get his feet under him as Meri hustled him down the corridor, Pidge barking directions into the comms.

Ryner turned away from them, picking up her pace to put as much distance between her and the side corridor as possible. She was some thirty feet farther on by the time the two cult members rounded the corner ahead. Catching sight of her, they stopped, and Ryner forced her antennae to droop in a show of relief.

“Finally,” she said. “I was beginning to think I was on my own in here.” She reached into her pouch and produced the medallion. “Prophet Ane sent me here, but I’m not entirely sure what I’m meant to be doing. Do you think you could help me?”

The man on the left straightened up, tucking his hands behind his back, perhaps to disguise the fact that he had gone for the knife at his waist. Ryner politely pretended not to have noticed and waited, smiling vapidly, as the two cultists glanced at each other, then nodded.

“This way,” the first man said. “We’ll take you to the Garden. The guides there will be able to help you settle in.”

Ryner followed them without hesitation, though her pulse had begun to race. She told herself this was the best option, the greatest odds for seeing the Cult in action. They would be sure to ease her into it, but she’d already hinted she was willing to ally with the Galra. Perhaps if she continued to reinforce the notion, they would push her through to the Cult’s real work. Perhaps, at least, she could wait for a quiet moment and slip away under the guise of looking for a washroom.

“Don’t worry, Ryner,” Pidge said, their voice undeniable comfort as it resounded in her ear. “I’m keeping an eye on your signal, so I’ll be able to follow wherever they take you. The second things start to get weird, I’ll be there.”

Ryner eyed the men on either side of her—too close to risk a verbal response to Pidge. Ryner focused instead on her gratitude, compacting it to a single, sharp point that smelled of sweet nectar. She pressed the sensation into the bond and willed it to reach Pidge. She couldn’t say how well the meaning came across, but she felt a flutter of something that might have been sympathy in response. Bolstered, Ryner raised her chin and followed the cultists deeper into Lubos’ palace.

* * *

Capitol Circuit had a hectic air to it, even when nothing was happening. There were always people on the streets, always lights flashing and computers chiming and machines whirring away just out of sight. Lance kept expecting to hear the honking of car horns, or to see a taxi pull out around the next corner.

Instead, there were just the passing shadows of transits and smaller private vehicles overhead.

In an hour and a half, they’d passed four Olkari patrols, the yellow and red emblems on their Galra armor always stopping Lance’s heart in his chest for just an instant before he remembered himself and pulled Val and Nyma into an alley or behind a cart where they would be less visible. Once, they managed to follow the patrol at a distance, listening to the two Olkari complain about long shifts and bad benefits.

“I mean, come _on_ ,” the man on the left said. “We’re the ones out here busting our asses trying to keep order in the city—and it’s not like we’re popular with people, either. The least they could do is pay us well, right?”

The woman walking with him snorted. “Be glad you get to spend your shifts out here. People might hate us, but it’s not like they’re going to try anything.”

“What, like it’s so terrible back at the command post? Air conditioning, padded chairs, friendly conversations in the break rooms...”

“Galra officers stopping by unannounced for an inspection,” the woman shot back.

The man snapped his mouth shut, staring at her. “No.”

She smiled tightly. “Showed up yesterday. No warning. Not so much as a call from the prophets. I’ve never been so happy to be a nobody on the force.”

Lance frowned, but slowed his pace as the Olkari turned onto a less crowded street. It would be harder to follow them unnoticed here, and the odds of learning something worth the risk were slim. He glanced at Val, who seemed as troubled as him.

It was hard to tell who these guards actually worked for. They wore Imperial uniforms, but people on the street talked like they were part of the Cult of Lubos. The Galra came through for inspections, apparently, but they expected the Cult to give them warning. Patrols, Cult, and Imperial command—it was like they were all one and the same, and it didn’t exactly inspire confidence in their ability to lure the Olkari patrols away from the fighting once the real battle began. Especially since they had yet to find any promising leads on viable distractions. The best they had right now was the convention center in the heart of the circuit, where they could conceivably barricade the police force.

Assuming they could lure them all there to begin with.

As they were coming up on the second check-in, Lance, Val, and Nyma followed a patrol back to the hub that served as a kind of local dispatch. Ten minutes of watching confirmed that this was where shift change happened—and the transmitter on the roof suggested it also served as the base of communications for at least this part of the capitol.

“So… what?” Val asked, sitting on her heels behind a raised planter across the street from the hub. “Let’s say we come here when we’re ready to attack. Who’s to say we can reach all the patrols in the capitol? Even if we can, how are we supposed to convince them to clear the streets?”

Lance pressed his lips together, searching for an answer. This hub could be pivotal in controlling the tide of armed Olkari who might fight on the Empire’s side, but Val was right. Without more information, the best they could do was take the hub out and hope that threw the patrols into disarray.

Throwing her head back, Nyma heaved a sigh. “You’re really going to make me do this, aren’t you. Hey, Allura?”

* * *

Allura grimaced as a bit of exposed wiring in the neck of a sentry spat sparks at her, singeing her fingers as she tried to get at the robot’s memory systems. At the sound of Nyma’s voice, she sat back, checking the time display in the corner of her visor. Still eleven minutes to the next check-in.

“I’m here,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Nyma paused. “Are you busy?”

Allura looked over her shoulder. Matt and Keith had claimed seats by the computer bank at the far side of the room, and though the motion of Matt’s fingers never slowed, he glanced Allura’s way, concern evident in his eyes.

It had been a risk, breaking into the satellite station that controlled sentries in this circuit, but a calculated one. As small as it was—well away from the minimal Galra presence in the North-Central Manufacturing Circuit—there were no living beings stationed here. They’d come in quiet, overpowering the two sentries inside before either could sound the alarm. Now Allura was trying to access their memory systems to erase all signs of their presence here while Keith and Matt stripped away layers of security to access the core network for the sentry force on Olkarion. Matt was on the comms with Pidge, the two of them consulting as Matt tried to slip past firewalls cordoning off this station from the other sentry divisions.

“I can talk,” Allura told Nyma.

“Good. You didn’t by any chance happen to get access to Galra systems, did you?”

“What do you take us for?” Matt asked, grinning. “Of course we did. Uploading Pidge’s kill switch as we speak.”

“Cool. Think you could do me a favor? I’m about to try something stupid, and I could use a little back-up.”

Allura traded glances with the others. She could hardly fail to note the air of satisfaction, even pride, that surrounded both red paladins as Nyma outlined her plan. She might have tried to put the breaks on the whole operation, if she’d thought anyone would listen. But Val seemed as enthusiastic about it as anyone, and even Lance was more curious than concerned.

“Fine,” Allura finally said, resisting the urge to rip the casing off the back of the sentry’s neck for easier access. “Just don’t get caught.”

* * *

Nyma grinned, bringing the butt of her rifle down on an Olkari’s head. He dropped as quickly as his companion, who lay moaning at Lance’s feet—not dead, but not going anywhere for a good few minutes. Hopefully that would be enough time.

“Don’t worry, princess. I never get caught.”

Moving quickly, she stripped off the Olkari cloak the rebels had given her, as well as the paladin armor beneath. That left her in a skintight black bodysuit. Not exactly standard Imperial issue, but close enough to pass. She sized up the two unconscious Olkari, then stripped off the armor of the one she judged to be closer to her size.

The armor was a little big on her, but Zarkon’s officers always did like to exaggerate their size. If Nyma’s performance was up to par, ill-fitting armor wouldn’t even register in these Olkari’s minds.

Within moments, she was dressed, and she glanced at Val, who had swapped her Olkari cloak for the dark gray Galra cloak of the second patrolman.

“You sure you want to do this?” Nyma asked. “You don’t have to go in there.”

Val shook her head. “I’m fine. Lance?”

He waved a hand at them both and rested his rifle against his shoulder. “I’ll make sure these two don’t give you any trouble. Just go. And be quick about it.”

Nyma flicked her fingers in a halfhearted salute, then gestured for Val to follow her. “Ready, boys?” she muttered into the comms.

“We have access to most systems linked to the street patrols,” Keith said. “Whatever you need, we’ve got.”

“You’d better.” Too soon, they were at the hub door. Nyma pounded on the door, waited two seconds, then pounded again before anyone inside had a chance to decide what to make of the noise, let alone answer the door. “Inspection,” Nyma barked. “Open up.”

Pounding footsteps approached, and the door slid aside, revealing a stout Olkari only half in uniform. He had the breastplate on, but neither helmet nor gloves, and he wore an embroidered cloak over his armor—clearly not something he’d gotten from the Empire.

Nyma scowled, and the Olkari cowered back. “You’re not Galra,” he said.

“Yeah, well, neither are you. Stand aside, you little maggot. I’m on a schedule here.”

She brushed past him, Val striding confidently beside her. The hub was small—a vestibule by the door, a locker room to one side, door ajar, several Olkari in the process of donning their armor inside, and a short corridor to the control room.

The door guard scurried after them, simpering protests, but Nyma ignored him and sought out the man in charge—an Olkari in full uniform with a crimson ornament on his shoulder. He didn’t wear an officer’s sigil on his chest, which meant he wasn’t as high ranking as he probably liked to believe.

He turned as Nyma entered the room and furrowed his brow. “Who are you people?”

“Captain Voska,” Nyma said, not missing a beat. “Escorting Officer Ekka here. Routine quality check, nothing to worry about. Just let us take a look at your equipment and we’ll be out of your hair before you know it.”

The Olkari officer’s lips flapped, indignant squeaks issuing from his mouth. “Quality check! You expect me to believe that? You—who _are_ you people? Who sent you?”

“Nexam is in charge of the capitol,” Keith said. “Looking for your specific area now--”

“Nexam,” Nyma said. She stepped forward, rattling off a comms frequency as Matt read it off to her. “Go ahead and call. He just _loves_ wasting his time with things like this.”

The Olkari’s face drained of color, and Val didn’t wait for him to recover. Striding forward, she snapped her fingers and barked at an Olkari tech to vacate his chair, which he did, albeit not without a nervous look at his superior.

Val ignored the look. “Let’s make this fast, okay?” she said sweetly to the Olkari sitting next to her. “Bring up your comms specs for me and we’ll get started.”

* * *

There was a cafe just around the corner that served what Irati described as the best tea on this or any planet. Hunk would have quibbled with that, but they were supposed to be forging an alliance here and telling their contact that her favorite tea tasted like sour spinach probably wouldn’t get them anywhere.

“You plan to move soon, then?” Irati asked, sipping her tea. A quiet word to the wait staff had found them a table on an upper balcony, surrounded by flowers with a nice view of Sec-Admin below. The door to the cafe’s main sitting area remained closed after the server brought their tea and an assortment of small cakes (better than the tea, but still too herby for Hunk’s taste.)

Shiro refilled his tea cup for the second time and turned his gaze to the horizon. “Nothing’s settled yet,” he said.

“Does it matter when we move?” Hunk asked. “Our teams have… similar interests. It only makes sense that we work together.”

“True,” Irati said. “Unless, of course, you aren’t who you say you are.”

“Or you aren’t.” Hunk paused, glancing at Shiro as he breathed out—not quite a sigh, but right on that line. Hunk’s heart fluttered, but he forged ahead. “I’m just saying. We’re all working on trust here. We’ve showed you our, uh, credentials, and you’ve showed us yours, but we both know… other parties might have reason to, um, pad their resume.”

It was a stilted speech, not half as smooth as what everyone else managed, but Hunk wasn’t used to talking around the issue. There had been a brief, candid exchange at the start of the conversation, during which Joska had played recorded messages from both Aransha and Ryner and handed over a seed that clearly meant something to Irati. In response, she’d showed them a symbol Joska confirmed had been sighted in connection with rebel activity in the City.

Ever since, it had been careful double-talk and innuendos that kept tripping Hunk up as he continuously reminded himself not to give too much away to anyone who might be listening in.

Irati kept her face blank, and Hunk couldn’t tell if that was because she wasn’t sold on this alliance or simply because she didn’t want to give anything away. Shay had retreated to the far side of the balcony to check in with the other paladins, as another hour had passed, and Hunk missed her presence at his side.

“Let’s assume for a moment that we’re both who we say we are,” Irati said, crumbling a bit of cake between her fingers. “You can withdraw if things go wrong. Disappear as you did once before and wait for attention to die down. We don’t have that luxury. So it stands to reason that we will play a more conservative game.”

“Fair enough,” Shiro said. “Then what do you want from us?”

“Honesty,” Irati said. “Tell us what you’re planning. By all means, be vague about the details, but give us a direction, and we’ll see what help we can offer.”

Shiro was quiet for a long moment, sipping his tea and watching Irati with an unyielding gaze. “Lubos,” he said at length. “We have… connections at the palace. That’s where we’ll be focusing our efforts for the time being.”

Irati arched an eyebrow. “Connections?” she said, smiling as she lifted her cup to her lips. “We have some of those ourselves. Perhaps we can work something out, after all."

* * *

The Cult of Lubos held their initiations on the dais overlooking the courtyard where Ryner had stood so long ago, looking up at her king in awe and admiration. She’d dreamed of winning Lubos’ favor, of proving herself worthy of his attention and of hearing him praise her achievements.

Now, she only felt sick.

“I welcome you all to our brotherhood,” Lubos said, raising a wineglass so a few drops sloshed over the side and stained the shoulder of his robe. He was half-drunk already, and though each of the initiates—three besides Ryner herself—had been introduced to him by the prophet who invited them, Lubos seemed to forget their names before they’d even finished bowing. He called Ane “Aven” and Ryner honestly couldn’t decide whether to believe him when he called his own adviser Sai-la.

Lubos hesitated a moment, seeming to have lost the train of his speech, but then the prophets raised their own glasses and cheered, and Lubos beamed again, downing the last of his wine.

“Don’t mind him,” Ane whispered as Sai-la took Lubos’ glass and ushered the king back towards the building. “He’s a good patron, and he doesn’t cause too much trouble for us.”

“Too much--” Ryner cut herself off before she let her anger slip out. It raged through her, making her hands shake, and she nearly dropped the small recording cube she held between her fingers. She was recording audio of the entire mission in case she overheard something she could leverage against the cult, but Lubos’ appearance had been as shocking at it was nauseating. If the people of the city saw their king acting like that, his keen mind lost to indulgence and disdain…

Well, that was a thought for later. For now, Ryner sipped her wine to calm her nerves and smiled at Ane.

“Well, that’s as much as anyone can ask for, isn’t it?”

Ane beamed, though it seemed sharper than it had before. “You are upset.”

Ryner wanted to deny it, but she knew she wasn’t that good of an actor. “Only surprised,” she said. “I met Lubos once, you see, back when I was a student at the university. He seemed so clever to me. I’ll admit, I let my fancy carry me away. I thought if I came here I might be able to learn from him.”

“Oh, my dear.” Ane clasped Ryner’s arm, squeezing until her grip began to turn painful. “We prophets can teach you all you need to know. All you need to do is listen.”

Ryner lifted her glass, smiling her brightest smile. “That I can certainly do.”

* * *

Matt drummed his fingers on the console, glancing over at the screen where he had Pidge’s program running. It had nearly finished inserting a kill switch into the sentries’ programming—a bit of code that would take the whole force out as soon as Pidge sent a signal—but Matt couldn’t help feeling like this whole thing had been too easy.

He still had Pidge, Nyma, and Val on the comms, though they were nearly finished at the Olkari guard post. He’d walked them through a few tests, and they’d sent over still images of the screens. Pidge already had access to the patrols’ comms frequency, and they were compiling a list of codes and commands they might be able to use to direct the Olkari away from the fighting—or at least to confuse them long enough for the less-dedicated troops to disappear into the chaos of the upcoming battle.

It was all going smoothly, and that had Matt on edge. He pushed up the goggles the Olkari had given him—great for reducing eye strain from Quintessence bleed, not so comfortable around the bridge of his nose—and leaned back in his seat.

“We’re missing something,” he said.

Allura snapped an access panel closed on the sentry beside her and turned to look at him. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s just...”

“The Empire isn’t this lax,” Keith said. “Even if they are letting the Olkari rule themselves, Zarkon doesn’t trust anyone. They should have been watching their systems more closely.”

Matt nodded. “Always assume your enemy is two steps ahead of you, even if they seem completely incompetent.”

An alarm began to flash on the control panel, and Matt winced. _I just had to jinx us,_ he thought, diving into the systems to figure out what had gone wrong. Had the kill switch triggered some security protocol? Had someone reported Val and Nyma’s stunt at the Olkari hub?

Allura shouted a warning from behind, and Matt leaped to his feet, turning just as the sentries came back to life, eyes flickering as their system rebooted.

“I thought you said we had an hour!” Matt cried, activating his shield.

Allura’s staff was already in her hand. “We should have,” she said, jabbing the first sentry with the sparking end of her staff. It jerked, but didn’t go down as it had before. Allura’s eyes widened.

With a grunt of frustration, Keith charged forward, bayard springing to hand, and beheaded both sentries in one clean strike.

Another alarm began to blare.

“Keith,” Allura barked. “We were supposed to be stealthy about this.”

“So we make it look like a malfunction or something.”

“A malfunction that made their _heads_ come off _?_ ”

“Would you rather they send our pictures back to the Galra command?”

Matt opened his mouth to interject, but the blaring alarm had lit a fire beneath his skin, and he abandoned his shield in favor of returning to his search for the cause. When he found it, his heart dropped right into his feet.

“Guys,” he said, switching to the open comms channel. “We have a problem.”

Allura and Keith fell silent at once, and moved in tandem to look over Matt’s shoulder. He pointed at a line of text on one screen, then called up a map of the City.

“Somebody just activated the sentries. All of them.”

“What?” Nyma’s voice was sharp, and Matt winced. Hopefully she’d made it out of the hub by now. “What did you _do_?”

“It wasn’t me,” Matt said. “The code didn’t trip any alarms. Look—let’s just deal with this, okay? Pidge, the kill switch is uploaded to ninety percent of the control towers. Do you have the trigger ready?”

“Yeah. Just give me--” They cut off with a cry of surprise, and Meri swore, the words lost in a sudden blaze of laserfire.

* * *

Ryner wavered where she stood as Pidge let out a soft gasp of pain. Then, quite suddenly, their comms cut out.

“Pidge?” Matt asked. “ _Pidge?_ ”

There was no answer. Ryner gripped her wine glass hard enough to make her knuckles hurt, Ane’s rambling description of the Cult’s accommodations fading to white noise as Ryner struggled not to let her fear show on her face.

Somewhere, someone was shouting—Hunk, perhaps, or maybe Lance. Maybe both; it was difficult to tell with Matt still calling Pidge’s name and Nyma cursing the entire Galra Empire.

“Shit!” That _was_ Lance, his voice pitched high with alarm. “Guys, it’s not just the sentries. The fleet’s on the move. It’s—god, I think it’s headed for the forest.”

Ryner’s heart seized, and her hand moved automatically for the communicator at her waist that would connect her to Aransha. Fortunately, Joska was faster, sounding an alarm that would have Aransha and all the other rebel cells prepping for an assault. But Ryner knew—if the Galra had decided to attack in earnest, the rebellion couldn’t hold out long.

“I don’t _care_ if you don’t trust us, Irati,” Shiro thundered. The other paladins fell silent at once, letting Shiro’s words come through even as he dropped his voice back to a civil tone. “The Galra are moving and my team is in danger. If we’re going to work together on this, now is the time. So _can you help us?_ ”

A beat of silence. Then an unfamiliar voice, coming through only faintly. “La-sai. It’s time.”

“La-sai?” Hunk asked. “Who’s--?”

A shadow moving on silent feet brushed past Ryner, moving swiftly and fluidly. Ane turned, a strangled cry rising to her lips in the instant before a pulse of light hit her in the chest, dropping her to the ground.

The cultist who had attacked her turned, pistol dissolving into light that streamed back into the unremarkable silvery bangle he wore around his wrist. “Ryner of the Voltron Paladins, I presume?” he asked. With a start, Ryner recognized him as Lubos’ adviser, Sai-la.

No.

“La-sai.”

La-sai nodded, smiling through the tension. “Pleasure to meet you. Let’s move.”


	13. The Pride of the Olkari

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The paladins began their infiltration of Inanimasi. Allura's team snuck into a sentry control center to upload a kill switch--only for every sentry in the city to activate simultaneously. Lance, who had been searching for a way to keep the Olkari guard force out of the upcoming battle, witnessed the Imperial fleet take to the skies, headed for the forest. Ryner led Pidge, Meri, and Zori into the heart of the Cult of Lubos--the palace itself, where Ryner began to gather information only to overhear a brief exchange of lasers as the others were discovered. Meanwhile Shiro, having made contact with the rebels in the city, pushed for an alliance, winning the aid of a rebel plant in the palace named La-sai.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for minor character death. Read [this note](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/private/170019799454/tumblr_p2zie5iMss1ttvln6) for more info, including what to skip if need be.

Pidge was in danger.

The knowledge hit Karen like a sledgehammer to the chest, stopping her short in the middle of the street. The crowd parted around her, hundreds of people continuing on with their lives as Karen's world began to fracture. Her bond with the Green Lion had gone mostly dormant over the last few days, her awareness of Pidge and Ryner fading to a comfortable afterthought as she settled into life on New Altea.

Now it came roaring back to the forefront, a raging river of fear that plunged her down where the warmth of the sun couldn’t reach her. Her child was in danger—alive for now, but there was no telling if that would last.

And Karen was halfway across the universe, standing on the street with a bag of produce in her arms and no clue what she was supposed to do.

She trembled, a million horrors playing out in her head, then took off running for the small apartment she shared with Eli and the long-range comms unit they had within.

* * *

The Olkari camp was a flurry of activity, soldiers taking up positions by the shields and manning heavy cannons that seemed to be made up entirely of wood and vines. Others grabbed Olkari children trying to make a break for the surface and herded them back toward the deepest recesses of the caves, which had been reinforced against aerial assaults. Officers called out orders and one room near the exit was packed with people on funny-looking communication devices all talking at once, trying to warn the other cells of the impending attack.

Zuza stood at the center of it all, too numb to do anything. She felt acutely out of place here, the lone Galra in the heart of a camp currently under threat by Zarkon’s forces. The Olkari had been welcoming of her, by and large, when she first arrived, but now a few of the passing soldiers spared her dark looks or shied away when they saw her, as though they’d forgotten she existed and assumed the enemy had already infiltrated their camp.

Those looks threatened to drive Zuza back into the caves to hide out the attack, just like she’d hid for every battle the paladins had fought since rescuing her from Revinor.

She stood firm, though. That was the whole reason she’d come down here, after all—to take a stand. She’d trained as a soldier, if only briefly. She knew how to fight, and she knew a fair amount about Imperial ships and strategies. She could help here. She _had_ to help.

Steeling herself, Zuza set off in search of Aransha, who was in command of the Olkari forces. Zuza stood out in the crowd, standing several inches taller than the tallest Olkari and notably broader than the predominance of slender builds around her. But she refused to hunch down or try to make herself look smaller. She refused to apologize for what she was.

Still, it was a relief when she found the command center, a small bunker away from the chaos of battle preparations. Screens showing the Olkari camp and the empty sky lined the walls, and another bank of comms buzzed with the constant chatter of reports coming in and orders going out. Aransha stood at the heart of the activity, hands clasped behind her back, a sleek set of polished wooden armor accentuating her robes. Her eyes were steady on the screens before her, and her antennae twitched occasionally as aides leaned in to pass her reports.

Zuza hesitated just inside the door as several of those within turned sharp gazes her way. A brief hush fell over those closest to the door, spreading outward in a wave as the first group turned back to their tasks.

Aransha turned, her antennae pricking up at the sight of Zuza. “Did you need something, child?”

“Just trying to figure out where I can be useful, ma’am,” Zuza said, grimacing as she fell back into the clipped tones she’d learned on the _Reaper._ She forced herself to relax and shrugged. “I don’t know how to use your tech, but I’m trained in close-quarters combat, and I could probably figure out a pistol or rifle if you have some to spare.”

Aransha studied her for a long moment, then quirked her fingers toward an aide, who scurried forward. “Show Zuza to the reserves. If we can outlast the initial assault, we’ll need all the ground troops we can get.”

* * *

Allura’s blood ran cold as she took in the situation displayed on the screens before her. Sentries all across the city were mobilizing, flooding the street with violence just waiting to boil over. So far they seemed to have no specific target, but the two crumpled heaps of metal on the floor behind her were an all too keen a reminder of what could happen if things went south.

“The code is ready to go?” she asked Matt, who had frozen halfway out of his seat at the control panel on one wall of the narrow bunker.

Matt sank back into his seat, shaking his head to clear it. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, it’s uploading to the last couple sectors now, so basically. Problem is, today was just supposed to be preparation for the real battle. I don’t have the activation code.”

Keith grunted. He held the bayard inactive in one hand, the other fiddling with something in his pocket. He stared at the downed sentries for a long moment, then locked eyes with Matt. “I’m sure they’re fine.”

Matt bit his lip. “Ryner? Any progress?”

“La-sai knows where prisoners are typically held,” Ryner said. “We’re heading there now.” She hesitated, strain entering her voice. “Keith is right, Matt. They are unharmed; I’m certain of it.”

Allura forced a smile at the thin reassurance. A similar panic was simmering deep inside her, a pressure that built with each passing minute as she waited for bad news. Meri had been with Pidge and Zori when all three had been attacked. Their comms were silent now, and there was no way to know what that meant.

There was also no time to worry about something she couldn’t change. “All right. Ryner will update us as soon as she finds the others. In the mean time, Zarkon’s forces are mobilizing. This fight is happening today, whether or not we’re ready for it.”

Shiro grunted. “Allura’s right, unfortunately. I’ll try to accelerate things with the rebels as much as I can. Lance, I wish we could have bought more time to figure out something to do about the Olkari troops, but we’re just going to have to make do.”

“We’ll figure something out,” Lance said, though he didn’t sound particularly confident.

Allura pulled in a deep breath and released it slowly, focusing on the things she could do now. The situation in the City was headed in a worrisome direction, but it hadn’t erupted into overt violence yet. The forest was another matter entirely, and none of the paladins was currently in a position to help.

Switching over to her long-range comms, Allura hailed the castle-ship. “Coran,” she said as soon as the comms channel opened. “Mobilize the Guard. We have a situation.”

* * *

“What’s the structure of your group like?” Shiro asked, turning down his comms as the others continued to discuss the ongoing mission. Shay and Joska remained at the fringes of this meeting, and Shiro trusted them to alert him to anything urgent that came up. “Do you have a leadership council of some sort—someone I could speak to about what’s happening?”

Irati hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “I suppose in light of recent events, a slight breach of protocol may be in order.”

Shiro smiled tightly, trying not to let his frustration show through. He understood the rebels’ need for secrecy, and that keeping potential allies at a distance was probably what had allowed them to keep going for so long under the Empire’s nose, but they didn’t have time to play this game. He only hoped the other rebel leaders would see sense.

Irati gestured to the server as they left, and the server answered with a subtle nod. He must be part of the resistance, too, then, or at least aware of Irati’s involvement. Interesting. How far did their influence reach? Maybe Olkarion wasn’t as complacent about the Galra occupation as it seemed on the surface.

Shiro could only hope.

Irati led them down quiet back streets to a transit station between two silvery towers. Rather than boarding the transit, however, Irati took an employee staircase to a lower level, then hurried along the main corridor to a room that seemed no different from the others. Supplies sat on shelves on either side of the room beyond, and a switch disguised as a frayed paint brush opened a hidden door in the far wall.

Here they found another transit line, this one only a single car, with an older Olkari man sitting watch in a booth by the track. His eyes widened at the sight of Shiro, Hunk, and Shay, but Irati placed a hand on his arm, forestalling any comment he might have made.

The layers of metal and stone overhead muted the signal to Shiro’s comms, reducing the others’ voices to whispers amid soft static, and his positioning system couldn’t pin down his location. They seemed to be heading south, though—toward the capitol?

Difficult to say. The ride lasted only a few minutes, and Irati paused to confer with their driver in low tones before leading them up through another secret door into another transit station. The comms signal stabilized, and positioning confirmed that they were in Capitol Circuit, albeit at the very edge.

“Are we close?” Shiro asked, drifting forward so he didn’t have to raise his voice to be heard.

Irati nodded. “Three dobashes away,” she said. “I asked Palben to call ahead for us, just so the others aren’t caught off guard by your presence. We don’t usually bring outsiders here.”

Shiro held out an arm, stopping Irati in her tracks. Motion from a side street raised an alarm even before he recognized the shape of several sentries in the shadows, eyes glowing an ominous red. Another contingent of sentries emerged farther down the street, a third closing in behind Shiro’s group.

The yellow bayard appeared in Hunk’s hand a split second after Shiro activated his wrist blades, and Irati muttered a curse.

“Are you armed?” Shiro asked her.

“Not for a fight like this,” Irati said, patting her hip. “Compact pistol. Three charges.”

Shiro grunted. “Stick close to Shay. She’ll protect you.” Shay nodded her agreement, but Shiro was already moving, diving into the fray before the sentries could close ranks. He targeted the sentries’ weapons, eyes, and necks, dropping three before they could get a bead on him.

In the next instant, the air came alive with the flash of lasers. Bystanders screamed and ran for cover, and Shay backed Irati toward one side of the street, Hunk gunning down any sentries who tried to pursue. Joska stood with her back to Hunk, picking off sentries one at a time. They were making steady progress against the force—but it wasn't quick enough.

Shiro turned from dispatching another cluster of sentries taking aim at fleeing civilians, and his blood ran cold. A group of sentries had taken shelter behind a parked transport, out of Hunk and Joska’s line of fire. Joska had broken away from Hunk to take care of this group, and a sentry on the other side of the street seized the opening, leveling its gun at Hunk’s back.

“No!” Shiro roared, ignoring the sentries still shooting at him as he sprinted for the one targeting Hunk. Hunk turned. The sentry fired.

Shiro flung himself forward into the path of fire, biting down on a scream as the laser impacted his side. He didn’t dare slow to assess the damage; he stumbled, caught himself, and decapitated the sentry before it had a chance to loose a second shot. Hunk shouted his name, but Shiro was acting on instinct now, hyper-aware of the threats around him. His own pain faded to an afterthought, and the roar of the crowd around him became so much white noise.

The second you stepped out onto these sands, survival was your only consideration; you couldn’t afford to think about pain or about the broken bodies around you. So he fought, tearing through enemy after enemy, every blow reverberating up his arms and gathering behind his temples in a pounding headache.

Even when it was over, it took a moment for him to come back to himself. The lights of the Arena still stung his eyes, but Hunk was there, crouched before him. Shiro's breath caught, but in the next instant he recognized the facade of the building beside him, the blue haze of the mountains in the distance. Hunk seemed to recognize the moment Shiro became aware of his surroundings—not bloodied sand and a crowd that thirsted for the next fight, but a city street now littered with metal shells and sparking wires.

Hunk rested a hand on Shiro’s shoulder, tethering him to the ground as he wrestled with his racing heart and laboring lungs. “You okay?” he asked.

Shiro ran a hand across his eyes, forcibly releasing his blades and stuffing the Arena back into the past. “Fine.” He started to stand, and the pain in his side made a resurgence. His breath hissed out between his teeth, and he touched his side, surprised to not find blood seeping through his undersuit.

Hunk pursed his lips.

“I’m fine,” Shiro repeated, more forcefully. This time when he stood he pushed through the pain, moving his hand away from his side to show that the hit wasn’t a bad one. “Suit absorbed most of the impact. I might have a bruise later, but no worse than that.”

Hunk didn’t look convinced, and with good reason: it took all of Shiro’s self-control not to wince as he turned to check on the others. They were fine, Shay occasionally sparing a look for Hunk and Shiro as she kept Joska and Irati occupied. Shiro was grateful for the distraction, though he wished he hadn’t needed one in the first place.

He turned back to Hunk, who was still glaring at Shiro’s side like he wanted to say something more. Catching Shiro’s eye, he crossed his arms. “You could have been hurt.”

He sounded almost angry about that, which Shiro found comforting and somewhat amusing. “It’s my job to keep the rest of you safe,” Shiro said. He clapped Hunk on the shoulder, straightened his spine, and led the way back to the others. “Don’t worry about me.”

Hunk’s brow furrowed at that, but he said nothing more, and once Irati recovered from the shock of the ambush, they continued on their way.

* * *

“I joined the resistance by accident, really,” La-sai said, his voice low. He’d brought them to a security terminal overlooking the palace’s central chamber and knocked out the guard with the same strange pulse he’d used to incapacitate Prophet Ane. Now Ryner was standing guard at the door while La-sai dug through the security feeds in search of the missing paladins.

“How do you accidentally join a resistance?” Ryner asked.

La-sai’s voice brightened with a grin Ryner couldn’t see. “Once the Galra came and took over the government, I knew things were headed in a bad direction. I also knew that the people who were fighting back openly were being made to disappear, and that I’d have to have some leverage if I wanted to change things down the road. I was one of the first people to join Lubos’s little circle here so that I could try to stop some of the worst of it. I didn’t realize other people had had the same idea until I caught one of them. I covered for their snooping, they put me in touch with their friends, and before I knew it I was taking on bigger and bigger risks until I got myself appointed as Lubos’s adviser—which isn’t as powerful a position as it sounds, by the way. I know almost everything that goes on in the palace, but I don’t have a say in the cult’s activities.”

“If you can find my friends, that’s more than enough.”

La-sai snorted. “You and I both know that isn’t true. Our people are suffering because of Lubos, and the Galra use his name to trick us into making weapons to use against other planets. We’re a planet of victims and of monsters, and some days I don’t know which I am.”

Ryner turned to face him, sympathy making her antennae stir. A tinted window behind La-sai gave her a breathtaking view of what had once been the focal point of this palace. Their ancestors had brought the seed of one of the great trees of Vivasi to the Deadlands when they began to build the City, and the royal palace had sprung up around it, sheltering the tree from the harsh winds of the plains and nurturing it with the Quintessence of the Olkari people. The crown of the palace was open to allow sun and rain inside, and the Olkari Tree had flourished for millennia since.

It was wilting now, its leaves pale and limp though it was the height of summer. The stands around the Tree, too, were empty of the displays Ryner had come so many times to see. The devices Lubos had created in each of his challenges through the years were, by tradition, displayed for public viewing, to remind the people of their leader’s skill with the arts.

Now the atrium was as hollow and sad as the king himself—a grand station stripped of substance and life.

“We’re going to fix this,” Ryner said. She caught La-sai’s gaze and held it. “I don’t know how, yet, but we will.”

La-sai smiled. “We can start by freeing your friends.” He hit a key, and a display appeared in the air between them, a three-dimensional view of a holding cell with Pidge, Meri, and Zori within. Pidge and Zori lay on the floor, unmoving, but Meri, still in the Olkari shift she'd adopted for the infiltration, was beginning to stir, pain flickering across her face. Ryner’s chest tightened.

“Let’s go.”

La-sai knew the interior of the palace intimately, and they encountered no other cultists on their way up to the detention block along the southern wall of the pyramid. Two cultists conferred in low tones outside the door here, and they turned in shock as La-sai raised his pistol and knocked them both out with two clean shots.

Ryner pressed her palm to the digital lock beside the door, feeling out the internal mechanism. It was difficult to guard a lock against the arts, so most functioned as a highly complex puzzle that you had to know the answer to in order to enter. It was a system as much based on integrity and the watchfulness of Olkari guards as on the lock itself, and Ryner, who had always harbored a great love of puzzles, had stumbled upon a talent for lockpicking early in her academic career.

That she’d rarely had cause to employ that particular talent hardly hindered her now as she methodically unraveled the threads holding the door closed. La-sai disappeared briefly while she worked, and by the time she had the door open, he’d returned with the others’ weapons, armor and communicators.

Meri sprang as soon as the door opened, and Ryner cursed as she dodged aside. Meri stumbled to a stop, nodded to Ryner, then looked questioningly at La-sai.

"He's a friend," Ryner assured her.

That seemed to be all the assurance Meri needed. Smiling at La-sai, she retrieved her armor and hastily pulled it back on.

“I still don’t know how they found us,” Meri said, settling her helmet over her head as Ryner knelt beside Pidge and shook them. They groaned, rolling away from her touch, and Ryner breathed a sigh of relief.

“They knew you were there?” Ryner asked Meri.

“Sure seemed to. They were ready for a fight, and they attacked the second the door opened. No hesitation.”

"They didn't kill you, though."

Meri's face darkened. "I heard the guards talking. Sounded like they were going to hand us over to the Galra. They've heard stories about the paladins of Voltron."

Unease settled in Ryner’s gut, but she focused on checking Pidge over for injury, then moved on to Zori once Pidge was awake and aware. Matt’s relief at hearing their voice was palpable, and the two of them set to work at once shutting down the sentries in the city.

“Wait,” Shiro said. “Can you hold off on that for about ten minutes?”

Pidge frowned. “I mean… sure. But why? I thought there were sentries _everywhere_.”

“There are,” Allura said. “But they don’t appear to be attacking civilians.”

“Yet.”

Shiro grunted. “I’m with the resistance now, but they aren’t quite ready to launch an attack. I don’t want to give the Galra Command time to account for the loss of the sentries.”

“So you’re gonna shut them down just before the attack?” Lance asked. “Smart.”

“What about you?” Shiro asked. “Any luck with the Olkari patrols?”

“We’re watching for now. They haven’t mobilized yet, and I don’t think we’re going to be able to do anything preemptively. But thanks to Val and Nyma’s little con earlier, we’ve got access to their communications network, so once things start heating up, we’ll sow a little confusion in their ranks, try to send some of them to deal with false alarms.”

Ryner nodded at Pidge, who shrugged and tapped a button on their gauntlet. “Sounds reasonable to me. Just give the word when you’re ready for me to kill the sentries. I’ve got everything loaded, so it shouldn’t take more than ten seconds.”

“In the mean time,” Ryner said, helping Zori to his feet, “we still have a job to finish.”

Meri grimaced. “Right. Discrediting the cult. Got some bad news there: we were interrupted before we could find anything in the Cult's records.”

Ryner glanced at La-sai. “That's okay. I think I have an idea, anyway. We just need to find Lubos.”

* * *

It took entirely too long to spur the resistance into motion. They existed for the express purpose of fighting back against Imperial rule, but when the time came to actually do something, they balked? Hunk just didn’t get it.

Shiro kept impressively calm through it all, his voice never rising to a shout and only rarely getting that steely edge that made everyone in the room sit up and take notice. He said the resistance had every right to be wary, and that any group so large was slow to get moving, even in an emergency.

Hunk thought Shiro was being way too gracious about the whole thing. Hunk tried to help with the negotiations for a little while, but kept having to hold himself back from lecturing people who talked a big game and then suddenly turned wishy-washy when it came time for action. Eventually he went to find Shay, and the two of them checked in with the other paladins.

But then, finally, it was time. Orders went out, alarms were sounded, and Shiro appeared with Joska and Irati, his lips quirking into a smile.

“We ready?” Hunk asked.

Shiro nodded. “The leaders put out a call to every resistance organizer in the City. They’re gathering at Imperial Command in the capitol and anywhere else the Galra have a foothold. We should head over so we’re ready to take center stage when the fighting begins.”

And by that, of course, he meant that _he_ would be taking center stage. He was doing a good job of hiding the pain of his earlier injury, but Hunk wasn’t fooled. He’d taken big hits like that before, and it was never pleasant, even if their armor did save them from losing a chunk of flesh. Every now and then Shiro would turn wrong and hesitate, just for an instant.

The real irony of the situation was that if it had been any other paladin who’d taken that wound, Shiro would have told them to stay back, to not risk getting hurt worse. But here Shiro was, ready to charge back in—ready, probably, to take another hit for Hunk. In all honesty, it pissed Hunk off, but now wasn’t the time to get into it, not with a battle building around them.

Well, if nothing else, the anger left little room for fear, and that together with the Ativan’s dampening effect on his anxiety left Hunk focused and resolute as they took to the streets. Their group started as just a dozen or so rebels, but more joined in as they streamed toward the center of the circuit. Other civilians saw their approach and paled, clearly reading into the significance of this march. Most fled or faded back into the shadows. Others joined the crowd, and by the time they made it to the plaza surrounded by artful pavilions, colorful shrubbery, and pristine buildings, their numbers had swelled to the hundreds.

Shiro ignored the bulk of the crowd and headed straight for the front, Hunk and Shay at his sides. Sentries had begun to gather at the edges of the plaza and outside the buildings, three ranks blocking the crowd off from the one Joska had identified as the Parliament chambers, which the Galra had turned into their command post.

“Pidge,” Shiro said, “it’s time.”

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, just as those at the front of the Olkari crowd were growing restless, beginning to test the sentries’ limits, every sentry in sight stiffened, heads lifting slightly like they were all staring at something on the rooftops. Then their lights winked out and they toppled.

The Olkari fell silent, staring in awe at the crumpled sentries. The few Galra officers who had come out to watch the slaughter wavered, open fear on their faces. They maintained their positions for a three-count.

One of the officers took a single step back, visibly shaken. As though they’d been waiting for that very signal, the crowd of Olkari rushed forward as one unit, some stealing the weapons off the fallen sentries, some awakening the plants and electronics around them. A wave of metal, wood, and lasers descended on the command post, and the officers fled inside, scrambling to barricade the door behind them.

Shiro was faster. With a burst of jaw-dropping speed, he broke away from the crowd, lowered his shoulder, and slammed into the door, flinging it backward and knocking one of the Galra officers to the ground.

Hunk glanced at Shay, who nodded, and the two of them rushed after Shiro. If he wasn’t going to pay attention to his own safety, then they’d just have to take care of that for him.

* * *

“Rebels gathering in the park,” Val barked, trying to match the brusque, clipped tones of the Olkari on the comms. In the chaos the rebel attacks had generated, it was easy enough to slip a few falsified reports in here and there.

“The park?” one of the operators asked. “Which park?”

“The one with all the plants, what do you think? Lubos! Just get somebody over here, all right? This is getting out of hand.”

Lance snorted, and Val lobbed a crumpled up piece of paper at him. He let out a squeak of indignation and glared at her, and Val covered the microphone on her borrowed headset as she mouthed, _I’m on the phone._ Lance stuck his tongue out at her.

“You two are weird,” Nyma said. She and Lance had taken up defensive positions at the door while Val carried out her charade. They had access to the comms channels the Olkari troops used, but that didn’t mean they could mask their own signal. Sooner or later, somebody was going to realize Val wasn’t who she claimed to be, and then somebody would be headed this way fast.

It was Val’s job to sabotage crowd-control efforts as much as possible before then. Ryner seemed to have something in mind for discrediting the Cult, but until that took effect they couldn’t expect the troops to just lay down their weapons.

That was where confusion came into play.

“Rebel faction advancing along I.19.227 toward the south,” somebody called. “Twenty to thirty rebels in evidence, unarmed.”

“Check your facts, dude,” Val shot back, pitching her voice low. “I.19.227 is clear—they’re on I.91.227, and there’s at least a hundred of them. Looks like they’ve picked up energy rifles from the decommissioned sentries. You’re going to want to send plenty of squads down that way.” Val licked her lips and went on in a cartoon French accent—not that it would come through that way, but evidently the universal translator got creative with minor differences like that. Nyma certainly got confused when Val messed around with accents, anyway. “Oui,” she said. “Ah can confirm zis. Mass demonstration on I.91.227. We need ze back-up.”

Lance stifled his laughter in his elbow, while Nyma only rolled her eyes and turned resolutely back to her watch. On the comms, the Olkari devolved into bickering, voices flying so thick and fast it was hard to make them all out. Most seemed to be agreeing with the original report, but Val definitely picked out at least one voice agreeing with her, and one that said it wasn’t I.91.227 at all but _V._ 91.227.

Eventually, the coordinator sent teams out to all three locations, which Val counted as a win. She cast some positive vibes toward whichever rebels might genuinely be at the original location and prayed they would be able to handle the skirmish when it came. Lance, who was listening in as well, forwarded the location to Shiro, who routed it to Irati, who would try to get in touch with her people.

The first shout came from outside a few minutes later, and Val traded worried looks with the others.

“Keep going,” Lance said, activating his bayard. “We’ll hold them off as long as we can.”

Val nodded, then waded back into the hail of reports as Lance and Nyma disappeared out the door.

 _We’ll all do as much as we can,_ Val thought _. Hopefully that adds up to enough._

* * *

Aransha’s hands shook as she conferred with other Elders, trying to consolidate survivors from cells that had already fallen and redirect firepower to where it would do the most good. She was not a general in any real sense, but she was comfortable in this chaos as many of her people were not, and she had a knack for getting information where it needed to go.

Right now, all the information incoming was of the catastrophic variety. Three of their neighboring cells had collapsed, most of their artillery going down as soon as they lost shields. Aransha’s troops, with the support of the Voltron Guard and the Castle of Lions itself, had managed to fell one warship so far, and she had reports of three others downed elsewhere in the forest, but it wasn’t enough. Not nearly.

Her one consolation was that the greatest threats had gone into orbit to face off against the castle, preventing the immediate desolation of the entire forest.

“We need a leg up,” she muttered, turning to the display that showed their troops’ distribution. Two of their anti-aircraft canons had been destroyed, and a group of their strongest speakers had gone to try to grow some more, but it was a slow process, and they needed more and more hands near the shield generators to repair them as the constant assault threatened to overload their power supply. “Something. _Anything._ ”

“We’ve already committed everything we have,” one of the officers said, his voice grim. “All our troops, all our weapons… We have civilians on the front lines right now, and it’s still not enough. These camps were never meant to stand up against this kind of assault.”

“If we can just hold out until the paladins return,” one of the others began.

“We can’t count on that,” Aransha said. “They have their own tasks, and pulling out now would put the entire City at risk.” She frowned, turning to the visual feeds as though they might give her some inspiration. The voices of the other cells' Elders echoed her own desperation back at her, one crying out in alarm before going abruptly silent.

A shadow flickered past one of the cameras, then another. Aransha blinked, and then the screens showing the ships overhead were teeming with tiny, swift-moving pinpricks that dwindled as they flew upward. A moment later, dozens of pips of golden light lit up the shadows on the underside of the nearest warship. The lasers swiveled toward motion in the forest, barrels gathering red light.

The lasers faded before they could fire, the shields and engines soon following suit. An awed hush fell over the control room as the ship crashed down on the forest in excruciating slow motion.

“Vivaskari!”

The sudden cry burst over the comms like a firework, echoed by another Elder.

Aransha didn’t wait to hear more details. Shouting back at her officers to tell the other cells to send out anyone who could speak Vivaskarii, she raced for the nearest ladder and emerged into the forest. The scent of smoke and blood hung thick in the air, and deep craters pockmarked the ground, but Aransha wasted no time on mourning the destruction. She ran, breath rattling in her lungs, for the quadrant where the call of _Vivaskari_ had come from.

Her knees nearly buckled when she saw Ne-ree there in full battle armor, bow in hand and a quiver on her back full of arrows tipped with the woody polyps they used to wipe out electronic devices.

“ _You came,_ ” Aransha said in Vivaskarii.

Ne-ree smiled. “ _The lion-speaker was very persuasive. This assault even more so. Many of our number have joined the fight, aiding where we are able._ ”

“ _We are immensely grateful._ ”

Ne-ree smiled, but returned her gaze to the sky. “We _can speak of such things later, Elder. For now, we must fight._ ”

Aransha nodded and, taking up the spare bow Ne-ree offered her, set her sights on the other Imperial ships raining death and destruction upon her home.

* * *

Lubos was easy enough to find, his lavish quarters located on the highest level of the palace. La-sai recited a list of the Cult’s atrocities the whole walk up, and by the time they arrived, Ryner’s blood was boiling. Her king. Her idol, for much of her life. The very best of what Olkarion had to offer.

Was this really all her people amounted to? Did all their pride flee in the face of a bigger bully? Was a bit of indulgence all it took to buy out their integrity?

They left La-sai and Meri--in the guise of a guard they'd knocked out and locked in a storage closet--outside, while the other three continued on. Ryner gestured to Pidge as she neared the door. They’d hacked into the public broadcasting frequencies and rigged the camera in their armor to broadcast to every cube in the city, including the public address system. It wouldn’t reach everyone, but it was as close as they could realistically hope to get.

Ryner wanted her people to see this.

“Lubos!” she roared, stalking through the door ahead of the others. Lubos’s suite was buried under mountains of luxurious silk, delicacies from far-off worlds, gems and fine works of art, curiosities, machines, and stack after stack of holodrama cubes—enough entertainment to keep the once-king’s mind off his people for two lifetimes. One such holodrama played out on a screen along the far wall.

Worst of all were the servants standing at attention around the edges of the room. No; _servant_ was too generous a term. These were Olkari dressed in the rags of Imperial prisoners, with collars around their neck to track their positions and a length of chain connecting their ankles. They shied away from Ryner’s voice and kept their eyes downcast, and for a moment all Ryner could do was stare, helpless rage bringing tears to her eyes.

When Lubos stumbled to his feet, eyes wide as he turned to face his uninvited guests, Ryner felt a sudden, intense urge to close the distance between them and slap the dumbfounded look right off his face.

She held herself back only because of her audience, many of whom knew nothing of Lubos’s crimes. She could not start this off with retribution, however much she wanted to. She could not give the Cult the opportunity to paint Lubos as the victim.

“King Lubos,” Ryner said again, her voice tightly controlled. “We have been looking for you. Do you know what’s happening in the City?”

Lubos narrowed his eyes, glancing past Ryner as though waiting for his guards to arrive. “Who are you? How did you get in here?”

“I am Ryner, daughter of Maeva. I once taught at the Capitol University. Please, your Majesty. Our people are dying in the streets, cut down by the Galra forces. We need your help.”

“What do you want me to do? That’s the street patrol’s job.”

Ryner pressed her lips together. “The patrols are attacking as well, your Majesty. We need you to intercede with the Galra Command on our behalf. Isn’t that why they left you in power? So you could be an intermediary between us?”

“Fah.” Lubos waved one hand and sank back into his chair, his other hand drifting toward the arm. “If there’s chaos in the streets, it’s only right that the patrols restore order.”

“Chaos?” Ryner demanded. “You think they have been controlling _chaos_ in the streets? Those patrols exist to arrest those who criticize the Galra, nothing more. The _chaos_ out there today is the anger of a people who have been bullied too long. You tried to negotiate peace for us, but the Galra refuse to honor it. Negotiate again, or help us reclaim our land—you of all people have the power to change things in the City.”

Lubos’ antennae twitched, and he surged to his feet, the prisoners around the room ducking down as though to avoid his line of sight. He stalked toward Ryner, who stood firm, unwilling to be cowed by the man before her. “What makes you think I want things to change?”

Ryner closed her eyes, the weight of those words being said outright rocking her more than all La-sai’s stories. She’d still held onto some hope that, somehow, Lubos was dissatisfied with the role he’d been forced into, that he might stand with his people if given the choice.

But he wouldn’t. And now the whole City knew it.

Ryner sighed, her shoulders slumping. She lifted her chin and searched Lubos’ eyes. “Tell me something, your Majesty. Did you ever fight? Did you ever even try? Or did you give away your throne the day Zarkon’s so-called emissaries stepped foot on our soil?”

“Did I fight?” Lubos laughed, his arms spreading wide to encompass the luxuries filling the room. “Do you really think I would be _here_ if I had resisted Emperor Zarkon? They’d have killed me!”

“So you gave us up to save your own life.”

“I made the smart choice. The rest of you could have done the same.”

Ryner’s anger ignited in her chest, burning hot as a welder’s torch, and when she stepped forward, Lubos retreated before her. “You betrayed us. You conspired with the enemy to surrender our City to invaders. You let them make you a figurehead, let them use you to recruit our people to establish military rule in _your_ name. You lured in our best engineers with lies and mysticism and tricked them into making whatever weapons the Galra wanted you to deliver. You handed over weapons to the Galra. Shields, wormholers, communicators that are infinitely harder to hack than any Zarkon had at his disposal before.” She paused, chest constricting as La-sai's testimony resounded in her head. “You had your followers make devices to contain a sentient being’s Quintessence and use it to power machines of war. To power Robeasts. You _knew_ Zarkon would use this technology to lay waste to his enemies and to independent peoples everywhere. Do you deny it?”

"I...I didn't..."

" _Do you deny it?_ "

“You don’t have to answer that, your Majesty.”

The prophet Ane appeared at the side of the room, silently closing a hidden door behind her. She smiled at Lubos, who backed off eagerly as Ane strode forward, coming to a stop toe to toe with Ryner.

“Ryner, is it?” Ane smiled. “I thought I recognized you. The last few decaphoebes have aged you, though. Goodness. You’re going to wither away any day now, aren’t you?”

Ryner clenched her hands at her sides, resisting the first biting comeback to spring to her lips. “Prophet Ane, how kind of you to join us. Perhaps I should have been talking to you all along. Lubos is a corrupt old sluggard who’s wasted his talent in decaphoebes of indulgence, but you always knew exactly what you were doing, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did,” Ane said, crossing her arms. “Somebody had to be on top of things around here. You think the magnificent Lubos over there was going to do it? No. He’s a puppet in every sense of the word.”

“So you’re the one who’s to blame for all the people who have died,” Zori said, his voice shaking as he pushed past Ryner. She reached out to stop him, but Zori shook her off. “All the people who were taken away for speaking out against the Galra, all the people who left to join your cult and never came back—all the people who died fighting back.”

“Acceptable losses,” Ane said. “As long as the Galra have people to make their tech, they don’t really care what happens to the rest of the planet. If it was up to Lubos, you’d have been left to your own devices until the rebellion built up and Zarkon had to wipe us all out.”

“The rebellion came anyway,” Zori shot back. “You can’t just erase anyone who disagrees with you. That’s not how it works.”

“Isn’t it, though?” Ane moved faster than Ryner could track, pulling out a compact pistol and leveling it at Zori’s chest. A strangled cry lodged in Ryner’s throat. The pulse of light seemed impossibly bright beside the glow of the holodrama, and it left Ryner’s eyes streaming as Zori collapsed, his breath coming in wet, ragged gasps.

Ane stared down at him, tapping the pistol against her hand.

“Ideas are like weeds, child. Let them grow and they’re going to spread. You have to pull them up by the root before they have the chance. Wipe out the threat to civilized society before--”

Ryner fired her pistol. She didn’t remember bringing it up, didn’t remember taking aim. It was only when she felt the resistance of the trigger beneath her finger and saw the flash of light as her laser hit a particle barrier that she registered the tears on her cheeks. _Zori._ Zori was--

Ane’s face darkened, and she leveled her blaster at Ryner, firing twice more. The shots burned through the civilian robes Ryner wore over her armor, but the breastplate beneath stopped them.

Ryner let her hand drop to her side. “Murderer,” she said. Motion behind Ane caught her eye, but Ryner didn’t let herself look at it. La-sai and Meri had said they would stop any guards Lubos tried to summon. Ane must have slipped past them, but they could hardly fail to hear the shot that had carried Zori to the ground. Ryner wrapped herself in anger, didn’t let her think about anything else but the raw disgust she felt for Lubos and Ane and all the rest of them. “Traitor," she hissed. "Everything you are, everything you do, goes against what we stand for as a people. Is there anything you wouldn’t sacrifice for your own greed? Is any price too high for your ambition? How many people do you have to kill before you recognize the monster wearing your skin?”

“At least one more,” Ane said, her smile crooked as she raised her pistol to level at Ryner’s head.

La-sai moved before she could shoot, hitting her with a blast from his stun gun. Ane’s eyes rolled back into her head, and she dropped beside Zori. Ryner rushed forward as La-sai turned his gun on Lubos, who had been inching toward the hidden door Ane had entered through. A flash of blue, and Lubos was as still as his prophet.

Ryner hardly noticed. Her hands shook as she reached out to Zori to check for a pulse. “You’re going to be all right, child,” she said, trying to keep her words soothing rather than frantic as she pulled back his robes to reveal the hole in his chest. Ryner’s breath caught in her throat, but she smiled at him. “You’re going to be all right.”

Zori lifted one hand off the ground, his fingers hooking into Ryner’s robes even as Meri knelt beside him, hands glowing blue as she poured her Quintessence into him. Zori opened his mouth as though to say something, his eyes staring intently into Ryner’s.

She watched as his eyes lost focus, his head slowly sinking back to the floor. He breathed out a thin sigh, and Ryner swallowed a sob as she waited for the next breath that never came.

Meri cursed, the glow around her hands brightening for a moment before fading altogether.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I'm too late.”

Ryner hushed her, resting her hand atop Meri’s. “It’s not your fault.” She managed a smile, pushing down the pain to be addressed later. For now, her home still needed her. “We’re finished at the palace,” she said into the comms, her voice like that of a stranger's. “Where are we needed next?”

“The forest,” Shiro said. “The Vivaskari came to help, so they’re putting up a good fight, but they could really use a lion or two out there.”

Ryner nodded to Pidge, who had ended the broadcast at some point but still stood by the door, staring at Zori’s body with wide eyes and an ashen face. “We’ll go,” they said, voice small.

“There’s a transport in the hangars if you need it,” La-sai said. “I’m going to go to the weapons store before the Galra get the idea to raid it.”

“Where is it?” Ryner asked, and passed along the address La-sai gave to the other paladins. “If any of you are close, he could use the backup. There’s no way to know how many cultists are like Ane.”

“We’re headed your way,” Allura said, “but it will be some time yet before we arrive.”

“Then I’ll go with him,” Meri said. “I don’t like the idea of anyone being on their own right now.”

Ryner looked once more at Zori’s body, silently promising to return for him and to give him a proper funeral when all was said and done. Then she turned her back on the scene, squeezed Pidge’s shoulder, and hurried off, following La-sai’s directions to the hangar and the transport waiting for them within.

* * *

Pidge had never seen Ryner like this. Burning with rage and grief, running like she had Zarkon himself snapping at her heels. Pidge was normally the faster of the two, but they had to hustle to keep pace with Ryner on the way down to the hangar, and the flight to the outskirts where they’d left Green passed in a blur of steel that came way too close for comfort.

It only got worse once they were inside Green and Ryner’s internal storm bled over into Pidge. Her impatience pushed Pidge to fly faster, gasping for air that never seemed to fill the cavity in their lungs.

People were dying.

Pidge saw their faces every time they blinked—Zori, Joska, Aransha, others from Ryner’s cell. Some of them Pidge had never seen before, but the faces plucked at them in a way that said they were important, or had been. The Galra fleet came into view in moments, and Pidge pushed Green faster, sinking her claws into the hull of the nearest ship and throwing it to the ground.

Several other ships turned their lasers on Green, but too many more continued to fire on the forest. Guard ships flashed past here and there, and the husk of several warships rose from the canopy in twisted black shapes that didn’t belong anywhere near Vivasi.

Every time a laser impacted the ground, it resonated in Ryner, and then on into Pidge. It burned in their eyes, clogged their throat, made their hands clench tighter around Green’s control.

 _We have to stop this,_ Ryner thought. Pidge didn’t think they were meant to overhear the thought, but it echoed in their mind, and the green of the forest expanded to fill their view. They remembered what it had been like, some weeks ago now when Ryner had first taken her spot in Green’s cockpit. They’d moved like part of the forest itself, then, and the planet had roused at their call.

They could do that again, couldn’t they?

Pidge angled them down before the plan had fully solidified, and Ryner plunged her hands into the sockets that connected her to the amplifier embedded in Green’s systems. They hit the canopy in a spray of leaves and snapping twigs.

It was like plunging beneath the surface of an ocean. Pidge’s mind blended with Ryner’s and with Green’s, and then it expanded, racing outward across the surface of the planet. They saw invaders streaming over the ground, spewing forth from crumpled alien ships. Olkari leaped on them, slapping pistols out of their hands and shaping vines to hold them in place. Pidge recognized Zuza among the defenders, her borrowed wooden armor cracked and dripping violet blood. She spun as a Galra officer swung for her neck, gathered herself, and leaped at the man, carrying him to the ground.

Pidge’s mind zipped away before the fight was over. They sensed the City more dimly than the forest, shadows outlined in veins of Quintessence, spotted here and there with pockets of life. Matt, Keith, and Allura fought in one such pocket, Olkari in Imperial uniforms battering them from all sides. Quintessence gathered beneath Matt’s skin, blinding in its intensity, and Keith roared defiance.

His voice was answered by another, and the Olkari dropped their weapons in shock as the Red Lion dropped from the sky, tail lashing as she crouched over her paladins, her eyes burning a challenge for any who dared to answer.

Awareness spread farther still, racing past stars and planets, many of them burning with their own life, to New Altea. Pidge’s mother went still as they arrived, her eyes going glassy. She turned, lips parting.

“Pidge?”

Her voice chased Pidge as the bond carried them farther still, farther and farther until they lost all sense of themself. Something else waited out there, something shrouded in darkness and pain. Pidge’s heart thudded in their chest, and they strained to the very limit of perception. Little pops of color burst across their vision, their mind howling in pain at being stretched so far, and Green rumbled a warning not to lose themself.

Pidge ignored it all and reached, holding their breath as they let an unnamed hope sprout in their chest.

Something reached back toward them.

Pidge blinked, and the distant shadow vanished. The stars winked out, their mind snapped back to the space it was meant to fill. Pidge’s vision whited out for a moment, and when it cleared, they were standing in a forest. It looked like Vivasi, at first. Then they looked again, and it was the California Redwoods, where Pidge’s family had once gone on vacation, hunting for the spot where they’d filmed the Endor scenes for _Return of the Jedi._ Their own little slice of space, right there on Earth.

It took only a moment to spot Ryner, who stood beside a cheery stream whose voice blended with the birds and the wind and the rumble of the Green Lion to create a symphony that no instruments, human or Olkari, could imitate.

“Where are we?” Pidge asked.

Ryner shook her head. “I’m not sure. But I can feel the forest. The spirit of Vivasi itself, like...”

_**The Heart.** _

The voice startled birds from their perches, and Pidge ducked as hundreds of wings flapped overhead. They turned, searching for the Green Lion. “The Heart?”

Green rumbled. _**A deep place. A deep connection.** _ Scents drifted to Pidge on the breeze, and for the first time, Pidge didn’t have to try to decipher them. They smelled soil warmed by the sun, clean water, damp leaves decomposing in the shadow of a fallen tree. They smelled solder and hot plastic and new leather and something sweet and sharp they couldn’t put a name to.

They couldn’t put a name to this place, either. The Heart would do, but it was incomplete. This was more than just the Heart of the Green Lion. It was a place of Quintessence, given substance by the paladin bond. It _was_ the paladin bond—a manifestation of mind and spirit, outside of the ordinary constraints of spacetime. The astral plane.

And the bond was stronger here, in the heart of a forest that itself was founded on ancient bonds of Quintessence and will, than almost anywhere else in the universe.

They knew what to do.

Pidge opened their eyes—Pidge and Ryner and Green all at once, three working in tandem. The forest flickered around them, Quintessence beading on leaves like dew. Not just here, either; _everywhere_. They could feel the whole of Vivasi gathering itself for one final strike.

Green moved, and the forest moved with her, vines and trees realigning and twisting together. They burst from the canopy all at once, a hundred spears of nature’s raw fury, each with impeccable aim. They burrowed into ships’ engines, crushed bridges and laser cannons and shield generators. The air filled with the sound of rending metal, like a flock of monstrous birds screeching in fear.

The echoes lingered for long moments before those, too, faded. Then, slowly, the forest retreated back into itself, lowering the corpses of the Galra fleet with it.

* * *

Hunk lowered his bayard as a team of Olkari rebels wrestled the last Galra officer to the ground. The fight had been far from bloodless; combatants on both sides lay moaning on the ground, far too many staring back at him with sightless eyes. The rebels were already tending to their wounded as others set guards to watch the Galra prisoners. No one spoke above a whisper, as though afraid the first to break the uneasy silence of the plaza would start a new round of bloodshed.

Hunk’s Ativan had long since burned off, and his hands shook as the adrenaline deserted him. He retched, bayard disappearing in a flash, and stumbled away from where the fighting had been at its most intense. _Breathe,_ he told himself. _Don't think about anything, just breathe._  Shay was with the medics, tending to the most gravely wounded, though she looked up in time to meet Hunk’s eyes with a smile that faltered as she saw his discomfort. He turned away before she decided to come check on him.

Shiro stood at the door of the last building they’d cleared, an archive where several Galra officers had barricaded themselves. Shiro handed them over to Irati, who sported a burn along her forearm. Joska sat nearby, enduring the ministrations of a medic who was examining a wound on her head. It seemed shallow, but it had severed one of her antennae and was bleeding profusely.

Swallowing against another surge of nausea, Hunk headed toward Shiro.

“Good job out there,” Shiro said, beaming at him.

Hunk stared back, too hollowed out by the fighting to compose an answer. Twice more during the fight, Shiro had taken a hit meant for Hunk. The first had barely grazed him, but the second had hit his prosthetic at an odd angle, and while the prosthetic itself was sturdy enough to have suffered no more than some cosmetic damage, Shiro was favoring the arm. If Hunk had to guess, he’d either messed up his shoulder or his residual limb was aching from having to take the brunt of the hit.

Shiro noticed Hunk staring at his arm and straightened up, deliberately relaxing his arm, which he’d held close to his chest ever since the fight. “You okay?” Shiro asked.

“Are you?”

Shiro pressed his lips together. “I told you, Hunk. I’ve survived worse than a couple of bruises,” he said, profoundly reasonable. “I’m fine.”

He wasn’t, but Hunk didn’t have the energy for a fight right now, so he just nodded. “Is the battle over, then?”

“Just about. Allura says the Olkari patrols have started surrendering. I don’t know if it was Ryner’s confrontation with Lubos that did it or just the strength of the resistance, but most of them decided this wasn’t a fight they wanted to pursue.”

“That’s good.”

“Mm.” Shiro surveyed the plaza one last time, then gestured for Hunk to follow and made his way back to the command post. “Come on. I want to see if the Galra had any useful information stored here.”

Olkari saluted as Hunk and Shiro passed, and Hunk ducked his head as his stomach gave a feeble flutter. He was stepping on Shiro’s heels all the way to the room at the heart of the building where computers beeped and whirred, unfazed by the blood now speckling their keys.

Hunk found a station tucked away in a corner that had been spared the worst of the fighting and plunged into the files, flipping through a directory in search of anything that looked promising. He skipped over inventory lists and printed a registry of personnel stationed on Olkarion, just in case someone had managed to slip away in the chaos. He pulled up a few schematics for Olkari-designed weapons, mostly out of curiosity, and copied them over to his armor’s built-in memory so he could pick them apart later.

He was just about to give up on finding anything interesting when he pulled up a record of transmissions to and from the command post. A wall of frantic calls for help drowned most of today’s log, but as Hunk scrolled up through the list, something caught his eye.

“Uh… Shiro?”

“Find something?”

Hunk hesitated, anxiety churning in his gut. He glanced behind him, fighting the unpleasant sensation that someone was looking over his shoulder. “This,” he said, pointing to a transmission from late last night.

"What is it?"

Hunk bit his lip and opened the file, hoping against hope that he was wrong.

"We're going back to the City in the morning," Allura's voice said. "Laying the groundwork for our assault. Hopefully nothing will go wrong, but you should be ready just in case."

"Of course, Princess," Coran's voice was crisp and clear--notably clearer than Allura's had been, as though he were closer to the recorder. "If you need us, we'll be there in a heartbeat."

"Yeah!" Wyn cried. "We'll come in guns blazing--pow! Pow!"

Coran laughed, smothering Wyn's rendition of laserfire, and Hunk clicked to stop the recording, starting up at Shiro. "The coordinates match up, too. This recording was sent from on board the castle-ship."

"They knew we were coming," Shiro said, his voice hushed with horror. "They knew exactly when to strike so that we wouldn't be able to stop them."

Hunk said nothing, but he met Shiro's eyes, and the unspoken truth passed between them. Someone on the castle-ship had betrayed them.

"Look through the rest of the files," Shiro said. "See if there were any other messages sent from those coordinates. Don't tell anyone until we know where it's safe to talk."

* * *

With the Galra fleet grounded, the tide of the battle instantly reversed. The army continued fighting on the ground, but they were in the Olkari's world now, and the Vivaskari made short work of the survivors.

The fighting in the City continued in bursts for a little over a week before the last of the Galra command officially surrendered. They’d tried to get the sentries operational again, had hid behind several short-lived resurgences by surviving cult members, then finally tried to storm the airfield where several warships were waiting to be decommissioned.

The paladins took it in turns to help put out these fires, using the time in between to rest, heal, and help the disparate rebel groups to piece their government back together.

Ryner was invited to take part in those talks, though she didn’t think herself particularly qualified to redesign a government. Of the three royal families on Olkarion, one had been wiped out for fighting back against the invasion, one had gone into hiding and showed no signs of returning, and the third—the one to which Lubos had belonged—was so low in public opinion that none of their members dared to put in an early bid for the throne.

That left the City with a power vacuum large enough to draw every opportunist out of the shadows. There were calls to formalize a new royal line, or to appoint a regent until a proper monarch could be found, or to do away with the monarchy altogether and let the parliament take over its duties.

Somebody even submitted Ryner’s name as a potential queen. She shut that discussion down at once, of course, grateful beyond reason that she could leverage her role as paladin as a reason she couldn’t be expected to stay around to govern. (She’d had quite enough of that running her cell for ten years; she didn’t need to graduate from two hundred people to nearly four billion.)

By the end of the week, they had a temporary solution in place—at least, everyone was calling it temporary; Ryner suspected it was the sort of temporary change that might easily become the new norm. They made no decision on the monarchy. La-sai, Aransha, and a half dozen others, mostly from the various rebel groups, were still officially being considered as Lubos’ successor, and all of them had joined with the surviving members of Parliament to address the most pressing issues: what to do with Lubos and his prophets, what to do with the Galra prisoners, and what to do about the retaliation they all knew was coming.

A startling number of Inanimaskari left the City in the wake of the violence, some joining the rebel cells in the forest who were themselves in the process of moving back to civilization. Others approached the Vivaskari directly, and though Lei-ree and other cell leaders seemed put out by the sudden influx of strangers, they didn’t deny the requests for asylum outright.

Ryner stood waist deep in the shifting currents of her people’s culture, floundering. She put in appearances where she needed to, she lent her ear and her wisdom when it was requested, and otherwise, she spent her time among the rubble of the clifftop camp where her cell was patching up its wounds.

Nearly half their warriors—sixty Olkari, all told—had died in the forest battle, along with two civilians sheltering in the tunnels below. Many more were wounded. The Castle of Lions landed in the crater left by one of the downed Galra ships and opened its cryopods to the most wounded, while the Guard shuttled others to the City to be seen by Olkarion’s best surgeons.

They held a memorial on the third day, in the early morning as the mist burned off, to give the dead back to the forest. Inanimasi had adopted cremation out of necessity, but when they’d left the City, Ryner’s cell had gone back to the old ways. They chose one of the largest scars left over from the battle, cleared out rubble and shattered wood, and dug out sixty-three graves.

The humans found it odd that they used no caskets in the burial—humans apparently strived to preserve the body intact after death. Ryner tried to explain to them that Olkari embraced decomposition as part of the natural end. They came from Olkarion, and when they died, they returned to the planet.

Each body was buried with an engineered legacy seed. Many of the warriors, knowing they faced death daily, had shaped their own legacy, imbuing the tree that would eventually mark their grave with some special quality. Some would bear fruit, some would produce leaves or bark with medicinal properties. Some would grow pods, which would themselves contain the seed of a weapon or tool or toy—something meaningful to the deceased.

About a dozen of the dead had not shaped a seed to be buried with. These individuals’ family and friends took on that task.

Zori had no family in the cell. His father had stayed behind when Zori fled with his mother into the forest, and his mother had died three years earlier in a Galra raid. The honor, therefore, fell to Ryner and Joska.

“A precala tree,” Ryner explained to Pidge, who had joined her today for a walk through the memorial grove. These trees matured quickly by design, but they needed careful tending. Ryner felt she owed it to her people to see to it personally. “Precalas traditionally are associated with peace and vitality.”

Pidge watched new leaves sprout from the sapling Ryner had just passed. “So how did you program it? Or… that’s not the right word, I know. Will it grow pods?”

Ryner shook her head, ghosting her hands along another sapling. She used only a sliver of Quintessence on each tree, but there were so many in this grove, and she’d done this so many times—every day since the memorial—that it was beginning to wear at her. She continued on in silence until they came to Zori’s tree, and she couldn’t help but smile as Pidge gasped.

“Is that…?”

Ryner pressed her fingertips to the sapling’s trunk, where glistening copper circuitry stood out against the smooth, pale bark. “It will need some time to mature, but if we got it right, it will be able to store and playback voice recordings, perhaps even images. A living computer to tell the story of our people. Zori never lost his love of electronics, you know, even though he was still a child when the Galra drove us out. It seemed wrong not to acknowledge that in his legacy.”

Pidge was silent for a long while, and Ryner gave some Quintessence to Zori’s tree, then knelt to spread the special fertilizer that would allow the tree to expand its circuitry, most of which would end up in the heartwood as the tree matured.

“You call these trees legacies,” Pidge finally said, kneeling beside Ryner. They hesitated, and Ryner passed them the bag of fertilizer, gesturing to the ground on the other side of the sapling where she hadn’t yet fertilized.

“It’s a reminder,” Ryner explained. “Everyone has a legacy. Everyone leaves something behind when they die. These groves give those legacies tangible form. They give us something to think about while we’re alive, a way to consciously shape the way we’re remembered.”

Pidge made a small, thoughtful noise and sat back on their heels, wiping their forehead and leaving behind a streak of dark soil. “Do you have a legacy?”

“I do.” Ryner said no more than that, though in truth she had begun to wonder whether the legacy she had designed for herself when she became Elder of this cell was still the legacy she wanted to leave. She’d imbued that seedwith powerful protective Quintessence, written its DNA such that, once mature, it would shield her people from Galra attacks.

But her duty had expanded exponentially since then, and she couldn’t build a shield large enough to protect the entire universe.

Maybe that was why she’d taken a second legacy seed when she’d claimed one for Zori. The second seed waited now in her inner pocket, an unassuming woody knob about the size of her palm waiting to be shaped.

Someday. Not yet.

Closing her eyes, Ryner pressed her hand again to Zori’s sapling, then stood and continued on her procession.

* * *

Matt was running thin. A week of fighting, of burying the dead. Just today they’d finally located one of the prison camps where dissidents had been sent. They already had leads on several more, but Keith had come to relieve Matt before he could follow up.

There was a funny sort of universality to Zarkon’s prisons. Didn’t matter where they were located or what sorts of prisoners were held within. Didn’t matter if they were running sick experiments or torturing people for information or making them fight to the death or just shuttling them off somewhere no one important had to think about it.

Matt saw himself in every one of the prisoners he’d helped rescue today, and he couldn’t even bring himself to be satisfied by the day’s work. There would always be more prisons, many worse than the ones they’d found today. Matt probably wouldn’t live to see the last one torn down.

He returned to the castle-ship in search of sleep, only to find himself wandering the corridors, head abuzz with dark memories and darker thoughts of what was to come. Shiro, Nyma, and Shay had all been on shift with Matt, but they’d already found sleep while Lance, Keith, and Hunk led the Olkari rescue workers to the other prisons. Pidge was on the comms deck talking to their mother—she’d hailed the castle five times by the end of the first day of fighting, and had answered within two seconds when Matt and Pidge, exhausted, had finally managed to return her call.

Matt thought his mother had held herself together surprisingly well, considering her bond with Green had apparently allowed her to sense the battle happening at a distance. Pidge, certainly, had been more receptive to her concern compared to their previous arguments, and had made a point of calling every day since.

Normally, Matt would have joined in, but today he felt… wrung out. Too raw from being back inside a Galra prison to face his mother and pretend everything was okay. Or worse, to face his mother and finally spill out the grizzly truth for her to see.

He lingered in the doorway for a long moment, smiling as Pidge huddled down in their blanket cocoon and talked about how they’d found their way back to the astral plane once things had quieted down. (“It’s _amazing_ , Mom! Like going camping without the mosquitos and poison ivy!”)

Matt left before they realized he was there and let his feet carry him wherever they would. He knew he should go back to his room; Shiro was probably waiting up for him, and if he didn’t show his face soon he might very well have a concerned boyfriend coming to track him down.

It didn’t matter. His head was running in too many directions at once, and he knew if he tried to sleep now he’d just toss and turn until he and Shiro _both_ gave up on rest.

He found himself heading out to Blue Tower, where the Guard had settled in. Matt didn’t know their rotation as well as he knew the paladins’, but he thought Akira was off now, and if anyone on the castle knew when not to pry, it was Akira. He had an ease about him that made everything seem like less of a big deal—and maybe if Shiro found Matt talking to Akira instead of moping alone somewhere, he’d forget to be worried.

That plan only lasted until Matt walked through the doors of the Second Cohort’s common area. Akira was there, along with several members of the Guard Matt didn’t know, but Matt hardly noticed any of them. Thace was there, and Matt felt a sudden, irrational surge of anger at the sight of him.

“Matt.” Thace inclined his head, and something in his posture suggested he was about to make a break for it. “Perhaps I should go…”

Matt bit down on his tongue, forcing himself to breathe. This was Thace, an _ally_ , even if he wasn’t Matt’s favorite person. Sure, Matt was still a little bitter about the way Thace had basically ignored Keith for more than a decade, the way he’d gone along with Keena’s manipulative little asshole moment back on New Altea. But Keith was convinced Thace meant well, and Matt was inclined to agree.

Except for that persistent voice, louder now with the Galra prisons fresh in his head, that kept asking just how much Thace had known.

“Stay,” Matt said, forcing cheer. “I insist.”

Akira’s eyes narrowed, and he glanced from Matt to Thace as the other pilots, sensing the mood, murmured excuses and slipped out of the room. Thace’s ears angled slightly back, but he kept his expression neutral as Matt passed by him to take a seat in one of the armchairs pushed to the edges of the room. He held his tongue for nearly a full minute, but the patience he would need to approach this with tact was beyond his capacities at the moment.

“Did you…?” Matt faltered, words deserting him. How did you ask someone if they’d left you to suffer? How did you ask when you weren’t even sure you wanted to hear the answer?

Thace sighed, turning to face Matt. “This is about what happened to you.” It wasn’t a question.

Matt lifted his chin, pursing his lips. “Yeah, actually. Did you know? About Vel-17?”

“No.”

One word. Just one word, but it settled in Matt’s stomach like lead. He didn’t know how to feel about it. Relieved? Angry? The faces of the Olkari prisoners flashed behind his eyelids, and he clenched the arms of his chair so tight his knuckles ached.

“But you knew about other prisons? You knew about what Haggar did in her labs?”

“Some,” Thace said. “I did what I could to find out about the Empire’s plans, and I sent that information along to people better situated to intervene.”

Matt laughed at that. “You sent it to New Altea—who, by the way, didn’t even try to hide the fact that they don’t waste resources on rescue missions.”

Akira opened his mouth, looking profoundly uncomfortable to be caught in the middle of this conversation. A glare from Matt was enough to shut him up.

“I reported to my sister directly,” Thace said, a rumble in his voice hastily smoothed over. “Keena has a habit of acting without the approval or knowledge of the council.”

“Oh, believe me, Thace, I know.”

Thace’s mouth snapped shut, and Matt felt a flare of vindication as uncertainty crossed his face.

But Matt wasn’t done yet. He stood, closing the distance between them. Thace tensed, one hand dropping to his side, and Matt took one more step forward before stopping, glaring up at Thace. “Did you know about the Arena? Did you know about Shiro?”

Thace’s breath stopped, which was all the answer Matt needed. He opened his mouth to tear into Thace, but a hand closed around his elbow, squeezing just hard enough to be a command.

Matt whirled, a snarl pulling at his lips.

Shiro caught his other arm, concern written plain on his face. “Matt...”

The rage fled in an instant at the sight of Shiro there, dressed in his black silk pajamas and the lion slippers Lance had insisted on digging out of storage for them all. There was no accusation in his voice, but it still left Matt feeling small and foolish. He glanced over his shoulder at Thace, whose breath had gone shallow, his eyes slightly glassy.

Matt pulled out of Shiro’s hold, turning toward Thace before thinking better of it and backing toward the door. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Shiro, with his open concern, or at Akira, who seemed to be doing his best to disappear. Matt opened his mouth to apologize, but the anger came rushing back in, this time directed inward. Frustrated tears sprang to his eyes, and his throat closed up.

He tried once more to apologize, then turned and fled.

He made it only as far as the first turn before Shiro called out after him. He stopped at once, as suddenly as though he'd hit a wall.

“I’m sorry,” Matt said as soon as Shiro turned the corner. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

Shiro caught his hand as it reached for his hair and pulled him closer. Matt melted into the embrace, feeling guilty all the while. “It’s okay,” Shiro said. “It’s been a long day.”

“That’s no excuse.” Matt turned his face into Shiro’s shoulder, wishing he could blot out the rest of the world and pretend the last five minutes had never happened. He waited for Shiro to say something more, but he remained quiet, just holding Matt. Shiro’s heart beat against Matt’s chest, and slowly the tension left his body.

“I keep thinking this is going to get easier,” Shiro said. “Dealing with what happened to us.”

Matt tightened his hold on Shiro. “I know.”

“It doesn’t get easier, though, does it? Not really. I mean… there are good days. More now than there used to be. But when the bad days hit, it’s like it takes me all the way back to the beginning.”

Tears prickled at Matt’s eyes again, bitter and defeated, and he let them fall. “I’m not mad at Thace,” he admitted, mumbling the words into Shiro’s shirt. “You have to make me tell him that, when we’ve both calmed down. I know he did as much as he could.”

Shiro hummed, his thumb rubbing small circles on Matt’s hip. “Was this about something else, then?”

"No," Matt said. "I don't know. There are so many people out there dealing with the same kind of thing we went through.” Matt pulled back, searching Shiro’s face. “My dad’s still out there somewhere. Pidge is looking, and I help when I can, but I can’t help feeling like there’s more I could be doing. And… Shiro, people knew what happened to us. Thace knew about you. He found out about Project Balmera, even if that was after I was free. What if somebody has already found my dad? Would they even tell us?”

Shiro’s brow creased. “I don’t know, Matt. I want to think they would, now that we’re allies, but… I don’t know.”

Matt sagged, breathing in the smell of him. “I was afraid you'd say that." He closed his eyes, riding out another surge of anger, and then forced himself to breathe. "What about you? You’ve been stressed lately. Anything I can help with?”

"Nothing major."

"You know you can't lie to me, Takashi."

Hesitating, Shiro glanced both ways down the corridor, then dropped his voice low. “I can’t tell you much here,” he said. “The castle might be compromised.”

“A spy?” Matt hardly breathed the word, but Shiro still shushed him.

“I don’t know. Allura and I are looking into it. We’ll fill everyone in once we have more to report.”

Matt cursed, an itch taking root between his shoulder blades. A spy on the castle. So Nyma wasn’t wrong about that, then. Or could it be that the castle was bugged? Matt opened his mouth to ask, but thought better of it. The idea surely would have occurred to Shiro and Allura already, and there wasn’t anything more Shiro could say on the subject. Not as long as they didn’t know where—or _who—_ was safe.

Footsteps in the distance startled Matt so bad he jolted upright, banging his head against Shiro’s chin. He winced, rubbing his head as Meri and Allura came into view, both grinning and practically bouncing out of their skin. They faltered at the sight of Matt, with his drying tear tracks and no doubt puffy eyes. He sniffled, wiped his eyes, and offered an apologetic shrug.

“Long day,” Shiro said by way of explanation. “You look like you have some good news to turn it around, though.”

“We do,” Meri said. “See, we were helping out in the city, sorting through everything down at the Galra command post, right? We went out for lunch with some of the other workers, and we got to talking about old times.”

“Old times?” Shiro asked.

Meri waved a hand. “The Olkari have been traveling the universe longer than a lot of species. They were one of Altea’s strongest allies, and they still have the records from ten thousand years ago. I guess there was a group just before the occupation that was trying to locate people with the technology or military strength to stand up to the Galra Empire. Obviously that got put on hold during the occupation, but one of the people we were talking with has been digging back through those records. And guess what?”

“What?”

Allura rose up on her toes, her eyes fixing on Matt. “We have a lead on a Pygnarat master.”

* * *

Karen felt as though she’d lost her way.

The days that followed the battle on Olkarion passed in a haze, every noise sparking an alarm inside her as she waited for the return of that horrible, pressing sense that she was needed half a universe away.

Eli did his best to distract her, giving her tasks to complete, tasks that didn’t take quite so much brain power as deciphering alien legal texts and tens of thousands of years worth of treaties.

“Remind me why we’re doing this?” she asked, watching clips of interviews Yvis had done with grateful Olkari.

Eli lifted his headphones away from his ears and sat back, rubbing eyes that were red from staring at computer screens for too long. “Information, Karen. Not everyone can fight, but that doesn’t mean we can’t help with the war effort. You know what Voltron’s two biggest hurdles are right now?”

“The ten thousand years of established rule Zarkon’s standing on and the fact that there are only five lions in existence?”

“No.” Eli held up a finger, paused, then pointed at her. “Actually, I guess you’re kind of right with the second half. But, no, their two biggest problems right now are, one, numbers. We don’t necessarily need more lions, but we do need a lot more people on our side. Two, and related to that, Zarkon’s done his best to destroy any lines of communication he doesn’t control, which means if Voltron hasn’t visited a planet personally, there’s a good chance they don’t know it exists.”

“Okay.”

Eli grabbed the bottle of fizzy green liquid that was New Altea’s equivalent of soda. “Information,” he said again, and took a drink. “We need to let people know who Voltron is and what they’re doing, and we need to spread the word about how people can help—how to fight, yes, but also what else needs doing.”

Karen turned back to her screen and the tearful Olkari recounting the story of how the red paladin had shielded her from lasers long enough for the princess to talk down the enemy. She wondered whether it had been Matt or Keith who’d helped her, and whether they’d been hurt in the process.

“So...” She paused the video. “We’re making propaganda.”

“Not propaganda,” Eli said sharply. “Think of us more as reporters covering a public interest story. We’re not going to lie, we’re not going to demonize the Galra, we’re not going to fearmonger or try to guilt people into going to war. We’re telling them what Zarkon doesn’t want them to know, and we’re directing them to people who can give them more information if they want to help.”

Nodding slowly, Karen traced the shape of the lion bond in her mind, reassuring herself that Pidge—and Ryner—was okay. “So this wasn’t a not-so-subtle way to remind me that my kids are saving lives?”

Eli froze. “That depends… Is it working?”

Karen sighed. Pushing back her chair, she gave Eli a tired smile and headed for the door. “I’m going to go for a walk, if that’s all right. I’ll be back.”

“Sure.” Eli managed to look guilty, for all the good it did Karen.

The thing was, she _knew_ Pidge and Matt were doing something important. She _knew_ they were making a difference in the universe, and that literal billions owed them their lives. That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was sitting around, helpless, as they risked themselves. The problem was going to the Mendozas’ and realizing that Luz and Mateo could hardly go more than an hour without asking about Lance, which only made Ramon’s smile run thin. The problem was that Val’s family was coming apart at the seams. Her mother, Carmen—the same woman who had once blamed Karen for getting Val killed—now turned to Karen for advice because she had no other options.

Sebastian was getting worse, Carmen said. He’d been quiet and withdrawn after Lance and Val disappeared from the Garrison, she said, but she’d hoped finding them both alive would help. Instead, he’d slipped further into this depression and rarely left his room. Karen hadn’t seen him at all the last time she stopped by.

Karen offered what help she could, of course, but if she’d had any useful advice to offer, she would have already put it to use quieting the voice that told her Pidge was going to die one day while Karen sat at home, powerless to help.

She’d tried to be angry at Green for forcing this bond on her, but Karen had made this choice herself. So what if she’d failed to think through the consequences of that decision? She knew when Pidge needed her—so what? The bond didn’t change the fact that Karen was a lawyer, not a warrior.

 _Support us,_ Green had said. As though it were that simple. As though learning how to draft a treaty between worlds _mattered_ when her kids were charging into battle right now, today, alone.

She should be doing more.

Karen soon found herself at Council Hall, a half-formed plan simmering in her mind. It was ludicrous, and she’d never get anyone to agree to it, which was probably a good thing. Surely this wasn’t what the Green Lion had meant when she named her condition for bonding with Karen.

After speaking with the receptionist, Karen was forced to wait, feeling painfully out of place in the grand lobby of the Hall. The walls were made of ridged black stone that glittered in the lamp light, giving her the impression that she’d wandered into a temple to Hades. Poor Persephone back from her summer sabbatical and resigned to another long winter in the Underworld.

“The situation is highly unstable. If we’re going to do this, we have to move _now_.”

“Really, Bel? You want to do this _here?_ ”

Karen turned, trying to place the second voice. She’d heard it before, somewhere. It took a moment to spot the pair, the taller of whom had pulled the other into a shadowed corner of the room, their voices dropping too low to hear. The shorter person, Bel, appeared Galra at first glance, but his pupils indicated mixed descent, and he cowered away from the other person—a burly Galra with startling magenta hair, whom Karen had seen talking with Kolivan on more than one occasion.

It was none of her business.

Karen turned back to the receptionist and smiled pleasantly, ignoring the almost-intelligible whisper of voices from across the room, but the sound pulled at her. Secrets were nothing groundbreaking for government officials, but this was bordering on cloak-and-dagger, and Karen had had altogether too much of that from her own government lately.

She resisted a moment longer, then began to explore the room, keeping her eyes on the gilt designs laid into the ceiling and trying to look like someone who was overawed by an alien world. As long as she remained on New Altea, she couldn’t make herself stand out less on, but she could make herself seem like less of a threat.

“...handle it,” the woman said.

“Keena--”

“I said I’ll handle it.”

Bel growled. “It’s not _you_ I’m worried about. I mean, are you sure he’s up to this? He’s a little…”

Keena went suddenly silent, and even from ten feet away, Karen felt as though the temperature had taken a plunge.

“I’m only going to tell you this once, Bel, so listen closely.” She stepped forward, and Bel grunted as his back hit the wall. “Don’t _ever_ question my son’s competence again. Ever.”

Oh.

It suddenly clicked—she knew this woman, by name if not personally. Matt had mentioned Keena once or twice, always with a curl of his lip and a grumble under his breath that Karen pretended not to hear.

This was Keith’s mother.

Suddenly the clandestine conversation seemed even more suspect than before.

Karen breathed deeply, trying to calm a sudden flare of protective anger. She didn’t think she’d made that much noise, but Keena’s head suddenly whipped around, her eyes zeroing in on Karen and narrowing. Karen stared back, digging in her heels as some primal instinct told her to run for cover.

_I’m not scared of you._

“Karen?”

Jumping, Karen turned away from Keena and found Kolivan watching her with cocked head. He glanced over her head at Keena and frowned.

“You wanted to speak to me?”

“Yes.” Karen straightened her spine, heart pounding. Now that she was here, she felt foolish, and she wondered if it was too late to call this whole farce off.

 _Support us,_ Green had said.

Well, Karen didn’t know if this was something she could do—but she could at least try. She looked up, meeting Kolivan’s eyes. “I understand this may not be something you have time to do personally, but I didn’t know who else to go to.”

“For the mother of not one but two paladins of Voltron?” Kolivan asked. “I might be able to clear my schedule.”

Karen smiled at that, though she felt more like screaming. “Thank you. But you might want to wait to hear my request before you go promising anything.”

“Wise words. What is your request?”

_Support us. However you can.  
_

“I need to learn how to fight," Karen said. "And I want you to train me.”


	14. Memory's Tide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The paladins confronted Lubos and his cult and freed Olkarion from Zarkon's rule, but the victory was not without cost. Zori, a young man from Ryner's cell, died in the fighting, and the paladins uncovered another problem: there's a spy on the castle-ship who informed the Galra Command of their battle plans. On the bright side, Allura and Meri now have a lead on a Pygnarat master who might be able to teach Matt and Val to harness their Quintessence. Meanwhile on New Altea, Karen Holt approached Kolivan and asked him to teach her how to fight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Minor trigger warning for unintentional misgendering in this chapter. Occurs in the scene that comes after the line, "You have my word."

“So I hear you’ve got a partial memory profile floating around here somewhere.”

Allura looked up from her datapad, somewhat surprised to find Shiro standing in the doorway of the empty conference room she’d claimed to mull over the information the Olkari xenologist had given her. A Pygnarat master—still alive, and still practicing the ancient arts, as recently as ten years ago. She kept trying to hedge her expectations, but victory was so close it was keeping her from sleep.

The star map she’d pulled up on the conference room’s projector cast Shiro in pale blue light, making him look tired.

Well. He _was_ tired. Him and Allura both. They’d been wary of talking openly about the transmission Hunk had discovered in the Galra command’s records, which seemed to have come from inside the castle-ship. Someone had alerted the Empire to the paladins' plans, and it had cost hundreds of Olkari their lives.

They didn’t know yet if it was a traitor, an electronic device, or the product of Haggar’s witchcraft. Whatever the case, they’d kept quiet about it so far, and it weighed on them. Enough so that Allura spent a good thirty seconds trying to figure out if Shiro was trying to hint that the memory profiles might somehow be the key to discussing the spy without anyone overhearing them.

Then she recognized the unasked question lurking beneath Shiro’s folded arms, and her cheeks flamed.

“I do,” she said. “A good night in the pod and it might even be ready for activation. Perhaps I should do that before I leave.” She eyed the scattering routes she’d plotted on her map. She wanted to get to the Pygnarat master’s location quickly, but without drawing attention to it, if she could help it. She wasn’t sure it mattered, in light of the spy situation, but that was no reason to get careless.

“That might be a good idea,” Shiro said. He stiffened, then bowed his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Not that I’m saying you’re going to die on this mission.”

Allura laughed, switching off the map and crossing to Shiro. She patted his cheek and smiled. “These past few days are starting to catch up to us both.”

“I guess they are.” Shiro huffed a laugh and let Allura lead him into the hall and toward the elevator. “I’ve just been thinking. Memory profiles are a paladin tradition, right?”

“We create profiles for anyone who has led a noteworthy life—the sort of person one might seek out for council after their passing. Paladins tend to lead such lives, and the inherent danger in the job makes it wise to take… preemptive action.”

Their footsteps rang loud in the corridor, and once they entered the elevator a haunted silence descended. The battle for Olkarion had been a bloody one, perhaps the bloodiest since this generation of paladins had been chosen. It had shaken them all, and Allura had helped bury too many soldiers not to consider the possibility that she might lose one or more of her friends before this war was done. Memory profiles weren’t a perfect solution, she knew, but it would be worse to have nothing.

“Maybe...” Shiro paused. The elevator chimed, signaling their arrival on the castle’s lowest floor, but neither moved to leave. After a long moment, Shiro finally said what both of them had been thinking. “Maybe we should all make one.”

“Perhaps.”

“How long does it take?”

“A day or two.” The door tried to close on them, and Allura hit the button to keep it open, tapping her chin with her other hand. “Actually, you know, we don’t have any data on how it works with humans.”

Shiro arched an eyebrow. “You mean because Alteans live so much longer? Because you have more memories than we do?”

Allura nodded, and as the elevator door tried to close again, she sighed and stepped out, heading in the direction of the memory pods. “We’ve had plenty of other short-lived species create memory profiles. It doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. Alteans and others like us store memories more efficiently, and it seems that makes us more efficient at uploading memories, as well. But you always have to wonder which species will be the one to break the mold.”

“And humans are good at that,” Shiro said. “Even so, at least a day to create these profiles.”

“It’s best if you split it up over several sessions. The process can be a strain, particularly if you’ve never done it before.”

Shiro nodded thoughtfully. “And we’ll want to set up a rotation. No reason to have half our team out of commission at once.”

Allura turned to look at him. “You’re honestly considering this, aren’t you?”

“I am.” Shiro tapped his fingernail on his prosthetic, then let his arms fall to his sides. “I won’t force them to do anything they aren’t comfortable with, of course, but I think we should put the possibility out there for them to consider.”

The door to the pod room came into view, and Allura gestured Shiro in. The sight of this space was a blow to Allura, leaving her momentarily breathless as Shiro wandered forward, taking in the sights. This wasn’t the pod bay where she’d sat vigil for her mother, only Coran and Alfor there to keep her company—that room was used only for last rites, as the pods were designed to be ejected, returning the dead to the universe’s embrace.

But the pods here had the same pristine shine, the memory vessels beside each one glowing with the aurora of the memory matrix, the Quintessence-based substrate in which memories were stored. It sang with a tune just beyond hearing, and the whole place smelled of disinfectant and dust. All together, it was entirely too much like the room at the other end of the corridor, and Allura struggled to get a hold of herself.

“Are you going to do it?” she asked, following Shiro with deliberate steps that shook off the past.

A memory matrix glittered in his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Not today, I don’t think, but… it’s a good idea.”

“Would it help you to see the pods in action? I could call Coran down here to set up a session for me.”

Shiro eyed her. “If you want to do that.”

“I do. Finding this master might take some time, and that’s not considering the time we’ll spend training with them. I should do it now while I have the option.” Her smile went crooked. “Besides, I need to stop thinking about other problems. This might be the best way to do that.”

It took Coran a few minutes to get down to the pod room, and Shiro and Allura spent the intervening time sitting together in silence. Allura stared at the pods with no small amount of trepidation; uploading memories was always a visceral process, and she’d avoided it in part because she knew it would mean returning to a time when her parents were still alive. Seeing them again, and knowing all the while that it was just a memory, was going to be painful.

But this was something she had to do, so when Coran finally arrived, she forced a smile and stepped confidently into the pod. It didn’t put her into stasis, as the cryopods did. If anything it was like falling asleep. Her body felt suddenly light, and the next thing Allura knew, she was drifting on the currents of her memories.

* * *

“Okay, I have to ask.” Val pressed her hands together, steepled fingers tapping against her lips. “Does anyone else feel like we just collectively adopted a twelve-year-old?”

Meri arched an eyebrow, but resisted the urge to remind Val that Wyn was Altean, and that Alteans aged differently than humans. “I mean, I think Coran would fight us for custody.”

Lance snorted into his cider, and Nyma quietly passed him a napkin as he started coughing. “I can see what you're getting at, though,” Nyma said. “It’s like… we’re responsible for him, right? Shit. I never signed up for this.”

“You _kinda_ did, though.” Meri leaned back in her chair, staring at the transparent dome covering this room. The castle-ship was still orbiting Olkarion, providing provisional defenses while the Council got the planetary defenses back up and running, and the planet glowed green and gold across the right half of the dome. Meri used to come here on not-actually-dates with Allura, so she knew this was the perfect place for a private dinner and some uninterrupted stargazing--or a glass of chilled cider and a discussion of Blue's newest cub, as the case may be. “Paladins train paladins. That’s the way it’s always been. Granted, the trainees aren’t usually this young, and, granted, the lions have never chosen successors early before, but...” She shrugged. “We’ve got time, at least?”

“There is that.” Lance cleared his throat once more before taking a cautious sip of his cider. “But that doesn’t change the fact that sooner or later Wyn’s gonna take over for one of us, and it’s our responsibility to make sure he’s ready when that happens. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t have the first clue how to go about doing that.”

Nyma lifted one shoulder in a shrug, but kept her eyes trained on the crystalline flute that held her cider. “Like I said. Didn’t sign up for this.”

Val drained the last of her drink and set the glass on the table, then swiveled her chair so she could lay her head on Nyma’s lap. “Maybe we don’t do anything. Not formally, anyway. Just encourage him to spend time with Blue, get to know him, and then when he’s ready we start teaching him self-defense?”

Meri tipped her glass toward Val. “That's... basically what I did with Lance, except that I couldn't actually bring him out to meet Blue. Besides, Wyn already knows about the war and what our jobs entail. Not the details, maybe, but he knows more than most people who ask to train under the paladins.”

“Because he was experimented on for almost a year,” Lance said. “He’s doing good, all things considered, but that doesn’t erase what happened to him. Shouldn’t we try to help him with that before anything else? I’m not gonna be the one to tell a traumatized kid that the entire universe is counting on him to keep it safe.”

A hysterical laugh rose in Meri’s throat, and she barely managed to turn it into a cough before she drew her companions’ attention. _You don’t want to throw a traumatized kid into this?_ she thought, watching the pinch of Lance’s brow. _Have you_ seen _this team? Traumatized kids thrown into war make up ninety percent of this team._

It was different, she knew, and not just because Wyn was younger. The current paladins had been chosen in a time of staggering need. The scope of Zarkon’s empire, the strength of his armies, meant that the lions couldn’t wait for pilots more suited to the demands of this role. She couldn’t say for sure how much of the choosing had been based on proximity, how much on potential, but in the end it didn’t matter. The lions had had to choose, and so they had.

Wyn had been spared that urgency. He might be a paladin someday, but that day didn’t have to be today.

“Lance is right.” Meri gave him a nod as he looked up at her, his lip caught between his teeth. “For now, we don’t need to do anything except be there for Wyn if he needs us. If Blue can help him heal, then we encourage that. Other than that—Lance, he’s already comfortable around you.”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re going to make the final calls on anything where Wyn’s concerned. You know him better than the rest of us, and odds are you’re going to be spending more time with him moving forward. We don’t want to smother him by all trying to get to know him at once.”

Lance nodded thoughtfully. “But what do I _do?_ ”

“Pretend he’s Luz,” Val said. “Look out for him, help him, but let him be his own person.” She grabbed the edge of the table and pulled herself off Nyma’s lap long enough to fix Lance with a stern look. “Don’t stress about this, baby cousin. You already know how to be a brother.”

* * *

“Holy shit, Mom!”

“Pidge. _Language_.”

Pidge scowled and crossed their arms. “I think I’m allowed to swear when my own mother shows up to family night with a black eye. Right?” They glanced sideways at Matt, who seemed too stunned to speak. Pidge couldn’t fault him for that; their mother looked like she’d taken a fist to the eye, possibly more than once, and they couldn’t fathom what had happened. “Tell me the truth, Mom. Have you been fighting?”

Karen cleared her throat, touching her fingertips to the dark swipe beneath her eye. The bruising covered a sizable portion of her face, from the outer edge of her brow ridge down across her cheek in dappled blue, violet, and a few touches of yellow. A cut on her cheekbone was scabbing over, and she winced as her fingers found it.

“This?” she asked. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“Are you sure?” Matt asked.

“I’m sure. I tripped on the coffee table in the middle of the night.”

“And punched yourself in the eye?” Pidge asked, their voice rising by a full octave. Their mother was full of surprises—the video of her tearing into Iverson after Val’s disappearance was proof enough of that—but there was something fundamentally wrong about Karen Holt with a shiner.

Karen sighed, combing her hair forward as though that might disguise the bruising. “What can I say? I’m a klutz at two in the morning.”

She laughed weakly, fooling precisely no one, and hurried on to other topics. It was a surreal hour and a half as they talked about Matt’s upcoming quest to find space Merlin, Pidge’s latest robotics project, Karen’s intergalactic law studies, and the cleanup on Olkarion, all the while ignoring the splotchy purple elephant in the room.

When Pidge finally ended the call, they sat back in their seat and stared blankly at the dark screen. “That was weird, right?”

“ _So_ weird.”

“Is… Is Mom in Fight Club? Is that what’s happening here?”

Matt blew out a long breath. “Honestly? I have no vrekking idea. Maybe she really did just trip.”

Pidge stared at him. “Tripped. Seriously?”

“It’s space!” Matt protested. “Weird things happen all the time. I’ve got literal magic crystals growing in my body.”

That drew a laugh out of Pidge, and they pressed a hand to their face. “At least we’re in agreement about Mom’s story being about as believable as magic crystals.”

Matt spread his hands wide. “She’s up to something, that’s for sure. But you know how stubborn she can get—hell, she’s the Master to your Padawan on that front, kiddo. She’s not gonna break until she’s good and ready.”

He was right, unfortunately. The unanswered questions continued to niggle at Pidge as they went back to work, turning over ploys they might use to get the truth out of their mother.

* * *

Keith didn’t know what he was doing here.

“Trust me,” Lance had said, and Keith hadn’t been able to find a reason to back out, even though he felt like he should have. Even if Rosa and Val greeted him with warm smiles—very _knowing_ smiles, complete with meaningful looks that make Keith’s skin itch. Even if Luz shrieked loud enough to make the holo image go fuzzy when she saw Keith, then seemed to want to crawl through the comms to hug him. Even if none of the other Mendozas said a word to indicate they didn’t want him there, Keith could feel it.

He didn’t belong.

It was the ease with which they all talked to each other, voices tumbling over each other and blending into a whirlwind of laughter and easy ribbing that Keith couldn’t keep up with, much less join in on. It was the inside jokes and the debates held in shorthand, all the heat gone out of them from what must have been years of rehashing the same old arguments. It was the way Rosa cooed over Luz and Mateo’s schoolwork and the way Val’s brow pinched when Sebastian answered her question with nothing more than a shrug and a feeble smile.

This was family, and while Keith might go so far as to call Lance family, he had no right to lay claim to the rest of them.

Hunk and his moms had set up shop on the other side of the room, though Hunk had disappeared a few minutes ago. Their conversation with Hunk’s Uncle Eli had carried the same implicit familiarity as the Mendozas’, though as far as Keith could tell, they were only talking about the promotional materials Eli had been putting together.

Hunk came jogging back into the room, dragging Akira behind him. Akira caught Keith’s gaze and raised his eyebrows.

“You, too, huh?”

Keith frowned, but Eli had already capitalized on Akira’s attention, launching into a speech about the Voltron Guard and wouldn’t it be good if people knew what they did? Maybe Akira could do an interview, maybe film some of the training sessions, maybe--

Lance poked Keith in the ribs, making him jump. Lance frowned, but only gestured to the screen, where Luz was once more leaning forward, flashing a toothy grin.

“Sorry,” Keith mumbled. “I missed that.”

“I _said_ , they have Voltron toys here!” Luz picked something up from the table and held it up close to the camera. “Mateo got the Blue Lion, but I don’t mind, because _I_ got Red, and Red’s _way_ better than Blue.”

“Luz,” Ramon said, fighting down a smile.

Luz shrank down, her smile turning to a pout. “What? She _is_. Red breathes fire _and_ she’s the fastest lion.”

Keith could feel the intensity of Lance’s gaze on the side of his head, but when he turned, Lance pretended to be interested in his fingernails. He went right back to staring as soon as Keith looked away.

 _I don’t know what you want,_ Keith thought, the words pooling just behind his teeth, echoing inside him but unable to make it past the final barrier. _Just tell me why I’m here._ He reached into his jacket pocket and rubbed the scrap of fabric he’d taken from Pidge’s trove of stim toys. It hadn’t looked like much—it could have easily been something they’d snatched out of a trash can or cut off an old shirt. It was rough fabric, the texture similar to that of Lance’s jacket, and it made his claw tingle when he ran the tip against the weave.

“That’s… cool,” Keith said once he realized Luz was waiting for an answer. “I’ll, uh, tell Red. She’d probably have demanded a Red Lion toy if she knew that was an option.”

Luz’s face lit up. “I’ll give her one next time you come visit!” She turned, latching onto Ramon’s arm. “Dad, can I? Can I give Red a toy next time they’re here? _Please?_ ”

Ramon glanced at Rosa, shaking his head. “I honestly can’t think of a reason to say no.”

“Yes!” Luz pumped her fist in the air and turned her attention back to Keith. “Now you _have_ to come back for a visit! I’ll give Red her present, and then you can take me out flying!”

“I—What?” Keith started to argue, or to at least point out that they weren’t likely to head back to New Altea any time soon, but Luz had already sold herself on the plan, and she was arguing with Mateo about whether it would be cooler to fly with Keith or Lance.

“Don’t bother trying to stop her,” Lance said, leaning in close to whisper in Keith’s ear. Keith’s fur stood on end as a shiver raced down his spine. He couldn’t decide if it was a pleasant sensation or a deeply unpleasant one, but he leaned away from Lance anyway—careful not to encroach on Val’s personal space on his other side. Lance just smiled, like he hadn’t noticed a thing. “Once Luz has her mind set on something, it’s impossible to talk her down.”

“Oh.” Keith’s eyes darted back to the screen, where Luz and Mateo had split off from the rest of the family, Mateo trying to take the Red Lion toy away from Luz. Luz pursed her lips, stomped down on Mateo’s foot, and took off running. Ramon sighed and went to calm Mateo down before he tackled his sister.

Keith let the rest of the conversation whip by without him; he was too busy staring at Lance, trying desperately to untangle the flashes of emotion that tugged at his expression. He gleaned nothing at all, and lost himself in the texture of Pidge’s cloth under his claws until the Mendozas exchanged their goodbyes and Rosa and Val headed for the door, chatting about dinner.

Keith grabbed Lance’s wrist as he started to follow, ears laying back as Lance turned to him with an eyebrow raised.

Hunk and his moms had left half an hour ago, so once Val and Rosa were out the door, it was just Keith and Lance in the long-range comms bay, the air around them thick with silence.

Keith swallowed and forced himself to look Lance in the eyes. “What was that about?”

“That?”

“Dragging me in here,” Keith said, barely holding back a snarl. “Watching me like a sentry any time I said anything. Getting in the way of your family time wasn’t _my_ idea.”

Lance’s eyes went wide. “Woah, woah, _woah!_ Getting in the way? _Keith._ ” Lance dropped his hands onto Keith’s shoulders, quieting the storm of frustration and confusion raging inside of him. “Back up for a sec, okay, buddy? You weren’t getting in the way of anything, are you kidding? My family loves you!”

“Then why did you keep looking at me like that?”

For a moment, Lance said nothing. He stared at the screen where the call had been displayed, worrying his lip, and had to try twice before he managed to speak. “Blue showed me a vision of the future. Me and Allura. I talked with Meri about it and she was, like, super adamant that those kinds of visions aren’t completely reliable. The future is in constant flux, or whatever. But I’m pretty sure this one’s gonna come true.”

“Okay...” Keith shifted his weight, wondering where Lance was going with this. “So, what did she show you?”

“Paladins. The next generation, I guess you could say.” Lance scratched his chin. “Luz was flying the Red Lion.”

“What?”

“…Will be, I guess. Allura doesn’t think it’ll happen for, like, a decade, but yeah.” He looked up, flashing a smile, and now that Keith knew what was going on inside Lance’s head—some of it, anyway—he could see the uncertainty pulling at Lance’s eyes. “Sorry for dropping that on you. My family really does love you, and you’re totally welcome to join in on any family things if you wanna. But I guess I did kinda had an ulterior motive today.”

“Because...” Keith shook his head, words failing him as he tried to wrap his head around it. Lance’s sister. In Red. For a second, panic closed in around Keith’s throat. He didn’t want to think about flying without Matt—worse, he didn’t want to think about being replaced himself. Red was a pillar in his life, and he couldn’t fathom giving her up to someone else.

With a sigh, Lance dropped down into one of the chairs, which spun slowly, Lance’s head lolling against the back. “Yeah. Odds are you’re gonna end up training her. Or helping Matt train her, at least. And I just kept thinking about how much she hung off you, right from the very start.”

Keith broke out of his stupor and took the seat next to Lance, drumming his claws on the armrest. “Yeah, I’m sure Red picked her because she liked my fluffy ears.”

Lance snorted, reaching out as his chair spun and flicking Keith’s ear. “You’ve got some serious juju in these things if they’re the key to finding new paladins.”

Keith swatted at Lance’s hand, but he couldn’t keep a smile off his face. “So did I pass your test?”

“Test?”

“That’s what this was, right? A test to see if you can trust me with your sister?”

Lance flushed. “What? No way! I trust you! I just—I just wanted to see how you two got along. Start to ease into the whole paladin thing, you know?”

Humming, Keith watched Lance spin, trying to pick out the individual worries lining his face. “You’re scared.”

“Of course I’m scared, Keith, she’s my sister. I mean, you know what we’ve been through. This isn’t an easy job. I know she’s not going out there tomorrow, but someday she will, and I’m probably going to be a nervous wreck every day until then.”

“Hey.” Keith grabbed hold of Lance’s chair, stopping its slow spin. He leaned forward, catching Lance’s eye. “I won’t let anything happen to her.”

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he felt foolish for saying them. Why should Lance trust his sister’s safety to someone else, _anyone_ else? And it was such a feeble promise to make anyway. Keith couldn’t predict where Luz’s path would take her, and he couldn’t guarantee he’d be in any position to look out for her.

But Lance’s smile went soft around the edges anyway, his eyes crinkling up as he stared back at Keith. The tension had drained out of him, and he sat slumped in his chair, his head tipped toward his shoulder. Keith’s heart beat quicker, and he pulled back, clearing his throat as he struggled to get his emotions back in line.

“Thanks.”

Lance’s voice was so soft Keith almost missed it, and he went still at once, afraid to miss whatever else Lance might have to say.

But for once, he didn’t say anything, just leaned forward, gave Keith a quick hug, and then pulled him to his feet. “Come on. We’ll be late for dinner.”

* * *

“Where’s Allura?”

Matt set his spoon down as soon as Hunk asked the question, one Matt was sure they’d all been thinking. It wasn’t like the paladins _never_ missed meals, or ate late, or took their food to wherever they were working. It was just that there was nothing really going on right now, so Allura’s absence was conspicuous. Even more so because she was the only one absent. If it was an emergency, Shiro would have been with her, if it had to do with the castle, Coran would have, and almost anything else probably would have meant that Meri had dragged her into it.

Matt wasn’t the only one to stop eating as soon as Hunk spoke, either. Almost every head swiveled toward Shiro in perfect union—even Akira and the mothers. Only Coran seemed unconcerned with the question, though he did raise an eyebrow at Shiro as though waiting to see what he would say.

Sighing, Shiro wiped his mouth with a napkin and pushed away his bowl of soup—chicken and rice, courtesy of Akani, and Matt hadn’t been prepared for how much the smell of it had made him drool when she carried the pot to the table.

“She’s in the memory pods down on the first floor,” Shiro said. “She wanted to add to her memory profile before she left.”

Matt’s stomach gave a lurch, and he clutched his armrest as silenced oozed over the table like a cracked egg. It wasn’t that he’d never considered the possibility that one of them might die in this war; he’d certainly come close enough several times. But it was different, preparing for it when there was no immediate danger. He didn’t have adrenaline to keep the existential void at bay now, and he stared down at his soup as he tried to sort through the emotions.

“What the hell does she need to do something like that for?” Pidge demanded, their voice shaking. They made a good show of anger, but Matt didn’t need to look at them to know they were scared. The war got a little more real every day, and Pidge had thus far coped primarily by not thinking about it.

He reached out under the table and grabbed their hand.

Around the table, the others seemed to be having similarly tumultuous reactions to the news. Hunk had gone ashen, one hand squeezing his spoon so tight Matt almost expected it to break in two. Lance looked thoughtful, and Val refused to lift her eyes above the tabletop.

Shiro waited a few more seconds as troubled emotions flickered around the circle and were smoothed out, then cleared his throat. “I’m planning to follow Allura’s lead once she’s out. If any of the rest of you are interested, I’m sure she or Coran would be happy to walk you through the process.”

Hunk’s head snapped up, his eyes going wide, and he opened his mouth like he wanted to call Shiro’s bluff. Only a strangled squeak made it out, however, and Meri closed a hand around his wrist.

Matt smiled at Pidge, ignoring the queasy sensation that had settled into the pit of his stomach. It didn’t surprise him that Shiro was thinking about this. He probably thought they should all make memory profiles, but he knew better than to push the issue. Hunk and Pidge, at least, would revolt at the thought, and Matt wasn’t honestly sure how well any of the others would take it, either.

He wasn’t sure how well _he_ would take it. He didn’t even like the cryopods all that much, and there was altogether too much darkness in his memories to give it form. Maybe someday, maybe once he’d had time to prepare. Not today.

The rest of dinner was quiet, and the handful of conversations that picked up were subdued and quickly petered out. Afterwards, Meri and Ryner joined Shiro as he headed down to the memory pods. Lance and Val stared after them, whispering fiercely to each other. Matt thought they might run after the group, but they didn’t. Nor did Shay, who sent Shiro’s retreating back a fleeting look before she turned and hurried after Hunk, who went straight to his moms and collapsed against Lana’s shoulder.

“You’re not thinking about going after them, are you?”

Matt looked down at Pidge, whose hands clenched like they were ready for a fight. Their eyes told a different story, however, and Matt stood and pulled them against his side. “No,” he said. “I’ll admit, I’m kinda curious how it works, but I’m in no rush to upload my brain to an alien supercomputer.” He paused, a smile tugging at his lips. “Actually, now that I say it out loud...”

“You wanna go all GlaDOS on this castle?” Pidge asked dryly. There was still a bit of a tremor to their voice, but when Matt looked down at them, they were smiling.

“No.” He pulled them closer and ruffled their hair, ignoring their squawks of protest. “Actually, I was just thinking we should build ourselves android vessels and use the castle’s tech to transplant our consciousness into them so we can live forever in our new, superior bodies.”

Pidge ducked and twisted to get away from Matt’s noogie, cheeks red as they laughed. “You want to be a robot forever? Seriously? If you go the hologram route, you’d have access to the castle’s core processor. You’d basically _be_ a supercomputer!”

“And trapped on the castle for all eternity,” Matt pointed out. “When I’m a robot, I’ll at least be able to go wherever I want. Don’t worry, though. I’ll come back and visit you, you old hermit.”

Pidge punched him in the side, and they didn’t even try to hold back. Matt doubled over, clutching his side as his laughter turned to wheezing.

“You’re the worst brother.”

“Hate to correct you there, Pidgey, but the word’s pronounced ‘best.’”

They snorted and jumped on his back, and he stumbled forward a few steps as he struggled to catch his balance. Once he was no longer in danger of pitching forward and smacking his face on the floor, he straightened, hooking his arms under Pidge’s legs. They stretched their arm past his face with a cry of, “To the lab!” and Matt obliged, racing through the castle’s corridors with Pidge’s shrieks of laughter ringing in his ears.

* * *

Allura’s cycle was just finishing up when Ryner and the others got down to the pod room. Coran crossed to the control panel at once, pulling up a status report and humming to himself as he looked it over. Ryner crossed to Allura’s pod, beside which stood a tall glass cylinder. A nebula glowed within, shifting slowly as pulses of light raced down from a spire at the top of the cylinder.

Quintessence. Ryner could sense it even before she placed her fingertips against the glass, and once she did the sensation magnified tenfold. It was rare to find such refined Quintessence, or to see it so intricately woven. It would take a considerable amount of time to sort through the inner workings of these machines and see how they worked—time Ryner didn’t have at the moment.

The lights in the cylinder sparkled once more, as though adding a hundred stars to the mix, then contracted to a single vein of blue-violet as the process wound down. A hiss of vapor announced the opening door, and Ryner stepped back as Allura stepped out of the pod. She staggered, slumping against Shiro, who had moved to catch her.

“Are you okay?” Shiro asked, breathless. It was only after he asked the question that Ryner noticed the tears on Allura’s cheeks.

Meri, who hadn’t moved from the doorway, surged forward, coming up on Allura’s other side. She cupped Allura’s cheek in her hand, her thumb wiping the tears away.

Allura smiled. “I’m well,” she said. “The last memory was… more poignant than I was expecting. My mother was there.”

A furrow puckered Shiro’s brow, and he searched Allura’s face even as she regained her bearing and stood under her own power. “I didn’t realize the process was so vivid.”

“It isn’t always. There are certain memories that draw you in, if you let them.”

That seemed trouble Shiro, and he stared at the memory pod as Coran came over to run a quick scan on Allura. (“Just a precaution,” he assured them all. “I’ve never seen anything go wrong with a memory transfer, but that’s no reason to get sloppy.”)

In moments, Allura was cleared, and Coran clapped his hands, stepping back to survey them all. “Right-o, then. All three of you going for a spin?”

“We should, uh.” Shiro cleared his throat, his gaze dropping to the floor before he caught himself and smiled at Coran. “We should try not to have too many people out of commission at once. Set up a rotation, don’t you think?”

Allura nodded too quickly for simple agreement. “Shiro’s right. And we need to talk anyway—about what Hunk found?”

“Right.” Shiro nodded, first to Allura, then to Ryner and Meri. “You don’t have to wait for me.” He lingered for a moment, mouth open like he wanted to say something more, then looked to Allura, who squeezed Meri’s hand before heading for the door.

Ryner said nothing as they left, though her heart ached for Shiro. Coran’s face, too, was a mask of sympathy, but he buried it under a smile as he launched into an explanation of the memory extraction process. “We’ll start with just a short session,” he said. “An hour or so. Lay the groundwork for your memory profile, let you get acquainted with the process. We can work our way up from there.”

“Yeah, thanks but no thanks,” Meri said. “I’ll do it in one run if it’s all the same to you.”

Faltering, Coran studied her. “Are you sure about that? I’m told the process can be quite draining.”

“I’ve got ten thousand years’ worth of stored Quintessence, Coran. I’ll be fine.”

Coran glanced at Ryner, and she couldn’t tell if he expected her to talk sense into Meri, or if he was just waiting for her to follow Meri’s lead. She shook her head. “An hour sounds fine.”

He smiled, thin though it was, and got the pods set up, and before Ryner knew it she was being sealed behind a wall of glass, Quintessence swelling around her until the rest of the world fell away. There was a sense of motion, like she was drifting down a fast-moving river, flickers of her life rising up on the waves around her, and something hooked into her gut and _tugged_. She plunged into a scene from her childhood, all towering buildings, blue skies, and the flash of electronics pulling her attention this way and that. She saw her parents, their faces clearer than her they had been in her mind’s eye for a very long while, and an unexpected swell of emotion rose up in her.

It was gone in a flash as the current pulled her onward toward dozens more memories.

* * *

Shame.

It assaulted Allura the second she stepped into the Black Lion’s cockpit, halting her in place. Ahead of her, Shiro’s steps slowed, his shoulders rising and falling as he drew in a deep breath. Slowly, the shame faded to a whisper.

Allura said nothing as she joined Shiro deeper in the cockpit. He settled into his seat by the controls, and she laid her hands on her control pedestals behind him. The Black Lion’s mind roared to life at once, and Shiro’s swirling thoughts reached out to her, tightening her throat as the cockpit faded from view.

An instant later, they stood on the astral plane, ankle-deep in still water that reflected the stars overhead. The Heart of the Black Lion was a serene place, and Shiro’s inner torment barely ruffled the surface of the water.

_**Peace.** _

Black’s voice wasn’t a sound so much as a flutter in Allura’s chest—echoed in Shiro, whom Allura could feel more acutely here than at any other time. Their minds were not quite one and the same, but they were near enough that Shiro’s discomfort and automatic rejection of Black’s sympathy made Allura’s muscles tense.

They stood a short distance apart from each other, Shiro by Black’s left front paw, Allura by her right, and when Allura tried to close the distance Shiro held her at bay with a thought.

Black rumbled, pressing images into their minds: Shiro before the memory pod, Allura crying as she fell into his arms. Shiro, asleep in the bed he shared with Matt, startling awake and clutching at his throat until Matt stirred and reached for him. He pulled Shiro’s hand down and kissed each fingertip in turn, murmuring words Allura couldn’t hear between each kiss. Shiro stared at him, the horror bleeding out of his eyes as Matt continued planting kisses up his arm, across his collarbone, and on to his jawline and the scar across his nose.

Shiro shook himself, and the memory shattered into fragments of light. Allura blinked, struggling to focus her eyes, and the light retreated to the sky overhead.

Shiro looked at her, discomfort pulsing through the bond, though he and Allura had discussed their nightmares before.

 _ **You know yourself,**_ Black said. _**There is no shame in that.**_

“We’re not here to talk about that,” Shiro said, his voice brittle. Guilt, shame, and anxiety clawed at Allura’s lungs, and she reached out to Black for the calm she needed to combat it, breathing deeply until Shiro’s shoulders lost their rigid set. The resistance he’d put up eased, and Allura stepped forward, the distance between them melting away between one breath and the next.

She touched his arm, willing him to sense her understanding. There were wounds to fresh to be revisited, even in the relative safety of the memory chambers; Allura knew that as well as anyone. She conjured up the memory of a dark night not so long ago, before she’d had Meri to quiet her nightmares, when the knowledge of her unfinished memory profile had clamped around her heart like a vice.

“Take as much time as you need,” she said, leaning her forehead against the side of Shiro’s head. “There’s no rush.”

He fought her for a moment, but disagreements were rare and usually short lived in the Heart, where the truest parts of them were laid bare for each other to see. His shame retreated, withering away to a fragment of what it had been, and Allura let him steer her mind to other considerations.

_**A spy.** _

Allura immediately rejected the notion. It was possible, she supposed, that one of the New Altean passengers had applied under less than honorable circumstances and was colluding with the Galra. Except that Nyma had seen evidence of a spy before any of them set foot on New Altea, which significantly reduced their pool of suspects.

The problem was that Allura trusted everyone in that subset, and it hurt—physically _hurt—_ to think that any one of them might have betrayed them.

“Maybe not a spy,” Shiro said. “Hunk was going to get with Pidge and do a sweep of the computer systems. Have you heard anything from them?”

_**Green says soon. Many directories to search.** _

Allura nodded. “They would have to be careful, I suppose. If it’s not in the computers, they won’t want to give away what they’re looking for.”

“And we’ve barely begun the physical sweep. It could still be an actual bug.”

“That was planted _when_ , Shiro?” Allura sighed, feeling instantly sorry for snapping. Shiro and Black both extended understanding threads, and Allura smiled. The expression soon faded. There was so much work to be done. So much potential for disaster. How could she leave Shiro to deal with this alone?

“No.”

Allura frowned at Shiro. “This is more important," she said.

“Than giving Matt and Val a long-term solution to their crystal sickness?” Shiro arched an eyebrow, and Black rumbled in agreement. “Finding the Pygnarat master is important.”

“But is it important for _me_ to go?”

A spike of fear. Allura realized, belatedly, what she’d just proposed. It wasn’t that Shiro didn’t trust Matt or Val to take care of themselves. But they’d both been prisoners of the Galra Empire not so very long ago. Sending them out there, alone, without the other paladins or any of the lions as backup… It was asking for trouble. Shiro would have gone with them himself if he’d thought he could benefit from training in the arts the same way Allura would.

“Are you going to be all right, though?” Allura asked. “Not that I don’t trust you, just--”

Shiro quieted her with a calming impulse. “I know, Allura,” he said, the truth ringing in his words. He turned his gaze to the sky, thoughts slow and languid. “I’ll still have Akira.”

Allura breathed out, relieved, though she knew she had no reason to be. It sounded arrogant to say that she and Matt were the only things keeping Shiro afloat. They were part of his emotional support, of course—a large part. But it wasn’t as though the rest of the team didn’t care, or that Shiro didn’t have people to confide in.

“We’ll stay in touch,” Shiro promised.

Allura nodded. “And you’ll go to Coran if you need to talk.”

It wasn’t a question, and Shiro didn’t bother with an answer. He was reluctant, to be sure, but Allura’s concern was genuine, and his acquiescence equally so. The team would survive without Allura. They would find the spy—if in fact it was a spy—and they would take care of each other. Shiro would take care of himself.

 _**Fine,** _ Black said, her presence spreading out to envelop them both in a shroud of warm, luminous mist. _**We will be fine.** _

* * *

“Are you _sure_ you don’t want to go with them?” Commander Shirogane asked. “It’s not too late to change your mind.”

Layeni resisted the urge to roll her eyes, but it was a near thing. Shirogane was… not exactly what she thought of when she thought of a commander. He was much too friendly, much too interested in her personal well-being. She was learning to appreciate that, but sometimes she wished he was the sort of person who respected the pull of duty.

“Commander, with all due respect, I’ve made my decision.”

“The crystals aren’t bothering you?”

The hesitance in Shirogane’s voice grated at Layeni, and she pulled up short, clasping her hands behind her back and lifting her chin as he turned to look at her. “Permission to speak freely, sir.”

Shirogane rolled his eyes, but he fell into something like a commander’s posture and nodded his head. “Granted.”

Layeni allowed herself a small smile at the snap of authority in his voice. She’d whip this boy into shape yet. “Akira,” she said, pointedly dropping the title. “I wasn’t in Project Balmera for all that long, and I did everything I could to make myself less of a target. I can show you the damn scans if you want, but trust me when I say my case isn’t nearly as bad as Holt and Mendoza’s. I’ve got a good few months at least before I’m symptomatic—time that desperately needs to go toward training up the Guard.”

“And you don’t think I could get by without you?” Akira asked.

Layeni flashed a toothy grin. “Not a cat in hell’s chance, sir.”

Akira laughed at that, the sound bright and full-bodied, and Layeni forced her mind out of its military tracks. The trouble was Akira took formality for dishonesty—not an unfair association, after all that happened with the Garrison, but a challenging one. Layeni was teaching him proper protocol, but for now she had to meet him halfway.

“This—building the Guard, training them—this is something I have to do. I need something like this to keep me going. A direction. A well-defined list of duties and expectations.” She hesitated, then started walking, leading Akira to an observation deck that currently looked out over Olkarion’s moon, which glowed a cheery green in the sun’s light. “Even if I went with Holt and Menoza and the Princess, what would I be doing? Learning magic? _Me?_ I don’t have that kind of imagination, Akira. I’m a soldier at heart. Give me orders, give me drills. Don’t give me children’s fancies. I was happy with the Stellar Corps. It was hard work, but it was fulfilling, and I’d have gone on doing it for years if not for Project Balmera.”

“You don’t trust them anymore,” Akira said. "That's why you didn't go back." There was no accusation in his words, only understanding, and he stepped up beside her, leaning his elbows on the narrow sill beneath the window.

“How can I be sure they aren’t just the same as the Garrison?”

Layeni ran a hand across her scalp, where her hair was only just beginning to come back in. She’d shaved her head in boot camp without a moment's hesitation—easier by far than trying to keep up a decent care routine between brutal drills and unexpected wake-up calls—but she’d always preferred a little bit of length. She felt naked wearing it like this, and she forced her hand down before the gesture drew attention.

“I don’t know that I have anything to go back to, now. I don’t know what the official story was after I disappeared, but if they didn’t mark me AWOL then, they sure as hell have now.”

“No one expects you to go back to that.”

“My tour’s not up yet,” Layeni said. “Justified or not, I’m a deserter, and I’ll be lucky if they don’t court martial me when I get back.”

Akira was silent for a long moment, staring out at the moon. He blew out a breath and ducked his head, scratching at his scalp. “Well… Do you _want_ to go back?”

Layeni stared at him, fighting down that gut reaction that told her duty demanded she go back and face the consequences of her actions. She could justify desertion while there was a larger fight to be fought, but after that…

“I don’t see that I have a choice,” she said, carefully neutral.

A smile tugged at Akira’s lips, and he glanced sidelong at her. “Really? Hundreds of planets out here, thousands of ships the size of a small city, maybe more. And you don’t have a choice?” He clucked his tongue. “Layeni, half our force is running from something, or trying to find something worthwhile to chase. What’s to stop you from making a home out here after the war?”

Guilt stirred at the thought. Guilt and shame. She acknowledged the feeling, letting it swell with her next breath, and released it on the exhale. The end of the war was still a long way off; there was time to figure out what she wanted to do. Still… “That does sound nice,” she admitted.

Akira smiled at the moon, self-satisfied and almost unbearably smug. “See? I know what I’m talking about.”

“Some of the time, anyway,” Layeni said, smiling as betrayal flashed across Akira’s face. She reached out and punched his shoulder affectionately, and he rolled with the motion. “Thanks, Commander.”

Shirogane’s face softened, then fell into the careful neutrality of military command. “Any time, Lieutenant. Any time.”

* * *

It was late, most of the castle already asleep. Aside from a skeleton crew of Guards and engineers—the first responders in case of a mid-night-cycle emergency—it was just Coran, once more finding the escape of sleep elusive. He’d forced himself to lie still for an hour, the music of his home planet playing softly from the speaker on his bedside table, but though his body relaxed within a few moments, his mind once more kept chugging away, cataloging every project that needed completion, every distress call still on their priority list.

Freeing Olkarion had gone more quickly than they’d anticipated, but stabilizing the planet had more than made up for that, and Coran kept watching the comms for the first sign that Zarkon and Haggar were back on the offensive. Did they dare involve themselves in another fight like Olkarion, and risk being unable to slow the momentum of Zarkon’s first push?

And what of the spy aboard the castle-ship? Allura had told Coran of it in low tones while they strolled the streets of Inanimasi, and it had sunk into his bones like ice. Faces flashed through his mind, one after another. He’d personally reviewed every applicant from New Altea, and his guilt at having let a potential spy into his home was matched only by his outrage on their behalf. The crew of the castle-ship was small; small enough that they felt a bit like family. Coran couldn’t see any one of them betraying this team.

Once it became clear the worries weren’t going to leave him alone, Coran got up, burning a bit of the Quintessence storm that still raged in him to chase away the physical exhaustion. He relieved Tev from his shift on the bridge, sending the youth off to bed with a warning that this wasn’t going to become a habit.

But Coran was restless, and there was no particular need to remain on the bridge itself. So he routed incoming transmissions and alerts to his tablet and went for a stroll. Motion, after all, had always been the key to untangling the worst of his mental hangups.

The map deck was not a room that saw frequent use. Similar displays could be called up on the bridge for navigation, and most holoprojectors in the castle could simulate small regions of space well enough for most purposes. It had mostly been used for astronomy and navigation lessons, and it had seen no visitors since the fall of Altea.

Until tonight.

The walls of the map deck absorbed light rather than reflecting it, which cut the haze you found in most holographic displays, and the projectors here had been designed to replicate color as accurately as possible. With the door closed, it was easy to forget you stood in a hologram and to think instead that you had stepped outside your mortal body and were walking among the stars like some kind of cosmic deity.

Thace stood at the center of the room when Coran arrived, and he gave a start as the light from the corridor spilled in through the open door. He reached up at once, fumbling through the gestures that would turn off the projectors. “My apologies,” he said, muttering a curse as a light flashed red near one of the projectors, indicating that the system didn’t recognize his command.

“No need for that,” Coran said brightly, striding forward and letting the door close behind him. The stars and planets around them glowed more brightly, little pops of pink and violet and green standing out among the dull reds and bright blue-whites of the stars. “Honestly, I thought the room might have activated itself. Ten thousand year old tech, you know.”

Thace went still, his raised arms illuminated by the light of a star that could have fit in the palm of his hand. “Of course,” he said, a taut thread in his voice betraying skepticism. “Is it all right for me to be in here? I would have asked, but...”

He trailed off, and Coran smiled. “Trouble sleeping?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Only because I’m intimately acquainted with the affliction.” Coran flicked his wrist to catch the system’s attention, then typed a series of coordinates into the air. It was possible to turn on a digital keypad to help with the input, but Coran had been here often enough for the controls to be second nature. “This was one of Lealle’s favorite rooms,” Coran explained as the stars shifted around them. They shattered as they encountered Coran’s and Thace’s bodies, then reformed on the other side, spinning contentedly in their usual paths.

“Lealle?” Thace asked.

Coran smiled as the projection came to a stop, a small blue and orange planet floating directly in front of him. The projection had zoomed in to give him a clearer view of the planet, so the star burning at the other end of the room was nearly two feet in diameter and bright enough to reveal the room’s two occupants: a couple of lost old men standing on a nigh-invisible floor in the middle of empty space.

“She was the blue paladin before the war,” Coran explained, tapping the planet before him to bring up a small screen detailing the planet’s climate, population, and other basic facts. “Allura’s mother, wife of King Alfor. She grew up on a merchant vessel, and she sometimes missed visiting distant planets just because they were there. Voltron mostly stuck close to home in those days, unless we received a direct plea from a planet without a defensive force of its own.

“Lealle used to come here just to remind herself how big the universe was. She’d tell me all these stories about the worlds she’d seen—their festivals, their food, their culture. She used to say you could sell to anyone, but if you wanted to _trade_ , you needed to know who you dealt with.”

“She sounds like a wise woman.”

Coran smiled down at the planet in his hands. Ystresan, it was called. Coran was glad to see it still existed after all this time—seemed to be thriving, based on the limited data he had available. Too many of the planets he remembered were burned-out husks by now.

“One of the wisest I’ve ever known,” he said. “I miss her.”

Thace moved on silent feet, closing the distance between them before Coran had registered the first step. He said nothing, just stared down at Ystresan with Coran and breathed, a faint rumble emanating from his throat with each breath. Coran smiled at the sound. He’d known enough Galra in his time to recognize the offering of condolences.

“The universe has changed so much while I was in stasis,” Coran said, angling himself slightly to the side so he wasn’t facing Thace directly, which could be taken as a sign of distrust. Galra had a complex and subtle system of nonverbal cues—or they had, last Coran had known. Keith seemed not to pick up on most of them, nor to give them off in a way that Coran recognized, but the refugees they’d rescued from Revinor had been more receptive, and Coran had watched them enough to modernize his slang, as it were.

Thace reacted to the gesture at once, his body relaxing as he mimicked Coran’s posture. “Mm. Feels as though you’ve stepped off a cliff, and now you’re waiting to hit the ground?”

Coran laughed once, a little breathless. “Like everything I learned, everything I trained for, isn’t enough anymore.”

“I don’t know if it was ever enough,” Thace admitted.

Coran tilted his head to the side, humming encouragingly, and Thace’s face flickered with emotions too plentiful to name.

“I was a soldier,” he said. “My parents were petty officers in Zarkon’s army, so my sister and I never had a life outside it. We completed our training, earned our ranks, did what was expected of us. Neither of us would have enlisted of our own choice, I think, but the military life chafed at Keena more than at me. She always hated the things we were asked to do. She wanted to change things.

“So she did, and I followed her. We taught ourselves how to spy, and we did that for nearly our entire adult lives.” Thace paused, one hand coming up to touch the scar that puckered the right side of his face. “I always assumed I would die in the service of the Accords. I never planned for how to cope with the fallout.”

Coran felt a pang of sympathy. Thace’s voice held an ache of loneliness that Coran knew all too well. They had led very different lives, but they’d both dedicated themselves to a duty they no longer had the chance to fulfill, and they’d both been cut off from whatever support network they might otherwise have had. They were drifting, but too tied up in this war, too much men of duty, to step back from the front lines.

Coran reached out, disturbing the image of Ystresan, and placed a hand on Thace’s shoulder. “Well,” he said. “Neither of us can go back and live our lives differently at this point, but we’re not dead yet, are we?”

“I don’t suppose we are,” Thace said, a wry smile tugging at his lips.

Coran nodded. “Then as long as neither of us can sleep, we can at least keep each other company. Have you ever played _eshet?_ ”

“No. What is it?”

“Strategy game.” Coran leaned in, cupping his hand around his mouth. “I’m one of the best players around, if you’re looking for a challenge.”

A competitive light sparked in Thace’s eye, and he smirked. “All right,” he said. “On one condition.”

“And what’s that?”

“When I win, you’re not allowed to pitch a fit.”

The words—and perhaps more so, the cocky tone in which they were spoken—startled a laugh out of Coran, and he slapped Thace on the back before turning and heading for the door. “Don’t worry. I have a feeling it won’t be an issue.”

* * *

“You _have_ to take me with you.”

Allura stared down at Edi, completely lost for words. “You want to come along. With _us?_ ” She glanced at Val and Matt, who looked equally stunned. They’d gathered outside the small, sleek ship they were taking on their search, the other paladins and Rosario there for a final farewell. Meri had only just emerged from the memory pod, a haunted look in her eyes, and she lingered nearby as Allura made her final preparations.

Lance leaned in close to Allura and whispered, “Can Galra even do magic?”

“I’m not sure,” Allura admitted. She hesitated, then knelt beside Edi. “Not everyone can learn the Pygnarat arts, Edi. You know that, right?”

“The druids can do magic,” Edi shot back.

Allura had to give her that one, though druidic magic was something wholly different from what the Pygnar taught. “Why do you want to come along so badly?”

Edi shrugged, scuffing her toes along the floor. “I don’t know… I just want to do something. Something important.”

Allura looked up, catching Shiro’s eyes. He knew of the vision the Blue Lion had showed her, of Edi wearing the armor of the black paladin. He looked conflicted, but like Allura he wasn’t immediately saying no.

“Have you spoken with Zelka about this?” Allura asked Edi, who flinched. Most of the children who had been on Revinor were orphans, or had been disowned by their parents when they were exiled. The other prisoners had adopted them as their own, and Zelka was in many ways the matriarch of the ramshackle little clan. _Hava Zelka_ , the children called her. Grandmother Zelka.

Allura sighed, then crossed to the comms station on the wall and pinged the bridge, where Zelka was on duty. Her face was stony as Allura outlined the situation, and she arched an eyebrow at Edi, whose ears couldn’t stay still for more than a few seconds as she waited for judgment to be passed.

“Edita,” Zelka said after a moment. “I need to speak with the princess privately for a moment. Could you give us space?”

Edi’s ears pressed flat against her head, but she nodded and scuttled back to where Keith was saying goodbye to Matt. Keith gave a start as Edi latched onto his waist and buried her face in his jacket. He stared down at her, face a mix of alarm and utter bafflement. Matt burst out laughing, the sound tugging at Allura’s lips.

She sobered as she turned back to Zelka. “I know this is sudden.”

“Perhaps,” Zelka said. “I’ve seen this brewing in all the young ones since you freed us.”

“If you’d rather she not go--”

Zelka shook her head. “What I want isn’t important. These children have been prisoners for far too long already. I don’t want them to feel trapped here.”

“So you’re okay with her going?”

“That depends,” Zelka said. “Are you anticipating danger?”

Allura hesitated. “We’re paladins of Voltron. We always have to be ready for a fight. We hope to be quiet enough to stay off Zarkon’s scanners, but I can’t guarantee anything.”

Zelka hummed, clearly not surprised by the answer. “There’s danger everywhere these days. Less protection with you, but also less a chance of entering into a fight. Stronger defenses on the castle-ship, but battles every other day. Who’s to say where she’s better off? The real question is whether or not you’re comfortable assuming responsibility for her well-being.”

Allura opened her mouth to say she wasn’t comfortable with that; she wasn’t comfortable in the least. But she stopped herself as Black gave a distant rumble. They were in the Guard’s hangar, as the ship they were taking came from the Guard fleet, but even at this distance Black was a clear presence in Allura’s head.

Edi was already Allura’s responsibility. She was one of Black’s chosen pilots, or would be some day. Allura could already see the steel core in her, the heart that knew what she wanted and wasn’t afraid to reach for it. Would it be to either of their benefit to keep Edi locked away here, safe from even the slightest danger?

Or would it be better to bring her along, to teach her how to be cautious, how to handle whatever challenges arose? The Olkari had pointed them toward a quiet region of space, nearly untouched by Zarkon’s reign. The master they sought had avoided detection this long. In all likelihood, the only real threat Edi would face if she came was boredom, should she prove not to have the spark required for the arts.

All in all, this was an ideal chance to get to know Edi and how she behaved when left to her own devices.

Allura met Zelka’s eyes and was surprised to find the woman smiling wistfully. “Take care of her, Princess,” Zelka said. “That’s all I ask.”

Allura’s throat tightened, but she kept her expression calm as she nodded. “I’ll bring her home safe. You have my word.”

* * *

Sam smiled as Rolo materialized in whatever space this was they occupied when they left their bodies. Not quite the real world, but not totally separate from it either. Rolo's body once more lay on the table inside the metal tube that was responsible for separating his mind from his body.

Rolo's _mind_ , on the other hand, was currently standing ten feet away, staring at his body like he wasn't quite sure whether to laugh or to scream.

"Confusing, isn't it?" Sam said, stepping forward. Rolo spun, eyes going wide.

"Sam? What are you doing here? How'd you get out?" He paled, spinning back towards the pair of druids monitoring this experiment. "Vrekt." He shoved Sam back toward a shadowed corner of the room, where they would be hidden from the druids.

Sam let himself be hurried along, though they were in no danger of being spotted. It had been a week since he'd first encountered Rolo in this space, and the druids had been unnervingly quiet in the mean time. Sam had spent most of his time watching Rolo, waiting to see if he would slip out of himself again.

He should have known better. It had taken several forced excursions before Sam began to do this spontaneously; Rolo still probably thought the last time had been a dream.

They'd only just reached the cover of the machinery around the edges of the room when Rolo froze, his grip on Sam's arm tightening. He reached down with his other hand, tracing the contours of his leg from hip to thigh to knee. He swayed, then yanked up his pant leg--worn, brown fabric tucked into a pair of sturdy boots. Beneath, Sam caught sight of a mechanical prosthetic that, while not as elegant as some Sam had seen back on Earth, was obviously well cared for.

"Where are we?" Rolo whispered. "What's happening?"

"I can't explain the finer details of it," Sam said, turning and sitting down with his back against the nearest machine. It circuitry called out to him, something almost sentient within its wires stirring at his proximity, but Sam shoved that part of himself down and patted the ground next to him. Rolo sat, an indicator light on the machine flickering feebly before going dark. Rolo stared at it, brow pinched. "What I do know is that the druids' experiments are designed to separate our Quintessence from our bodies. Turns out when you do that, the mind also pops free and just sort of... wanders. That's what we are."

Rolo tore his eyes away from the machine, frowning. "Minds?"

"Consciousnesses, if you prefer. If they keep running these experiments on you, you'll eventually get to the point that you can leave your body whenever you like. Can't go far, but I've been able to expand my range a little bit."

"Why?"

Sam shrugged. "It beats staring at a wall contemplating my own death. Besides, this... whatever you call this place--it comes with a few advantages." Sam splayed his hand against the machine behind them, his mind spooling out along its circuits. He focused on the indicator lights between him and Rolo, lighting them one by one. "Technopathy. First thing to do is learn to control it. The Galra know that what they're doing to us lets us mess with their equipment. They don't realize the extent of my abilities, though, which means I've been able to dig through their files without them knowing."

"Huh." Rolo ran his fingers through his hair. "That's... something."

"There's more." Sam pulled out of the machine, his heart pounding in his chest. It was a strange sensation, not least because he knew it was all in his head. He didn't have a body here, and in fact he could control how he manifested, at least to a degree. But his mind was hardwired for certain physiological reactions, and so he still experienced them when he expected to. He breathed in, forcing himself to take this one step at a time. "The druids have no idea that their experiments let us do this. I'm not sure if it's that they don't realize our consciousness is separate from both our body and our Quintessence, or if they assume we aren't aware enough to do anything like this. Either way, they aren't monitoring us. When we're like this, we can talk freely."

Rolo looked over at him, his lips parting as the implications set in. "Then--"

"I'll help you get the hang of this, of course," Sam said. "But first--please, I have to know. Have you met my son?"

Rolo nodded slowly. "Matt Holt, yeah?"

Sam's breath caught, a knot of emotions lodged in his chest. "Yes."

"If it's the same guy I'm thinking of, then yeah. He's one of the paladins of Voltron. Him and his kid sibling--Pidge?"

 _Pidge._ Sam pressed a hand to his eyes, and he knew if he'd been in his body he would have been crying. That was a name he hadn't heard in a long time. Pidge. Matt used to call Katie that sometimes. She'd always hated it--but there was no one else that could have been. Sam didn't know what she was doing in space--a paladin of Voltron. He thought he might have been upset about that, but he couldn't. He just couldn't, not when he finally had proof that his son had escaped captivity, had found his way home, if only for a little while.

"What...?" Sam cleared his throat. "There was someone else who was captured with us. I don't know what happened to him, but he was still with Matt when they sent me away. His name was Takashi Shirogane."

"Shiro?" Rolo beamed. "Yeah, man. He's with Matt and Pidge."

Relief flooded Sam's veins, making his consciousness go fuzzy around the edges. It was hard to concentrate on maintaining this state when confronted with news like that.

They were out. They'd made it.

"God," Sam whispered, his voice shaking. Rolo grabbed his wrist, his face twisted with concern, but Sam gave him a reassuring smile. His chest felt as though it were filling with helium, light enough that he might float away at any moment and full almost to bursting. He was in hell, and he had Rolo to look out for, but Shiro and Matt, at least, had been spared this fate.

That knowledge alone was worth everything he'd suffered in this place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I received some more fanart over the weekend! Take a look at [Matt with his crystal scars](http://confused-bird.tumblr.com/post/170209427224/i-finally-got-around-to-drawing-matt-from)!


	15. Parting of Ways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Allura, Ryner, and Meri all took a turn in the memory pods, building profiles that can eventually be used to create AIs. Shiro had planned on joining them but changed his mind once he realized how vividly people in the pods relive their past. Allura and Black validated his caution, and then the three of them discussed the spy and the quest to find the Pygnarat master for Matt and Val. Allura offered to stay and help Shiro deal with the spy situation, but he urged her to go. Ultimately, Edi decided to join them.
> 
> Meanwhile the Blues had a discussion about Wyn, and Layeni continued her quest to turn Akira into a proper military man. Pidge and Matt got a shock when Karen turned up to their space Skype call with a black eye. Lance pulled Keith into Mendoza family shenanigans and subsequently confided in him about Luz's future bond with Red. Thace and Coran had a conversation about duty and grief.
> 
> And of course, Sam and Rolo finally had a chance to talk without worrying about listening ears, and Sam learned that Matt and Shiro escaped and made their way home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for this chapter: Flashbacks, violence, and a panic attack beginning at, "Shiro tasted blood." Flashback/violence warning lasts through the italicized section; the panic attack and after effects persist to varying degrees through the line that starts, "By the time she was done..."

“I mean, it’s almost to the point where I _want_ something to go wrong,” Keith said, one hand waving in the air. A long cord dangled from his closed fist, and Pidge caught a flash of bright green when he turned his hand just right. “Not that I want Zarkon to start attacking people again, but a little action might help with the whole...”

He trailed off, gesturing vaguely at the Green Lion’s hangar before giving up and shoving the robot-shaped silicone chewer back into his mouth.

Pidge glanced at him, arching an eyebrow. “Yeah.”

Keith’s ears angled back, and he gave them an unimpressed look. “Yeah?” he repeated. “That’s all you have to say?”

With an exasperated sigh, Pidge pushed their computer away and swiveled their chair toward Keith. He’d been spending more and more time in here since Matt had left, showing up freshly showered after a stint on the training deck and flopping down on the imitation beanbag chair Pidge had found on a swap moon. That would have been just fine, except that Matt’s absence had turned Keith into… Well, frankly, a nervous wreck.

“Sorry,” Pidge said, forcing calm. Never mind they were two hours deep into a new dataset, checking and rechecking every entry their algorithms had flagged as potentially relevant to their search for their dad. Never mind they hadn't signed up to help Keith deal with his restlessness. It wasn't like he was  _trying_ to distract them. “I know it sucks. Everyone’s wound tight because of… everything.”

Keith rolled his eyes, wrapping the cord around his hand as he worried the stim toy between his teeth. Pidge had only tried chewing a handful of times--they always found themself drifting back to other stims--but they still had a handful of unused chewers. Keith loved them, though, ironically, he seemed to talk _more_ with a hunk of silicone in his mouth.

“We’re just waiting for something to happen,” he said. “With Zarkon, with the war, with…”

With the spy.

Even just thinking about it, Pidge itched to pull up the results of their latest scan. They’d all but ruled out a program in the central computer as the source of the leak, but, setting aside an actual traitor, that still left the potential for hardware somewhere on or in the ship that was spying on them and sending back regular updates to any Galra in the area. Pidge had set Green to scan all incoming and outgoing transmissions, hopefully subtly enough to no tip off the spy.

They still weren’t allowed to talk about it, at least in the open. Over the last few days, Pidge, Hunk, Ryner, and Coran had taken turns slipping off to an unused set of rooms in the upper floors of Green Tower. No one had been up there before a week ago, so the odds of there being physical bugs in the area were next to nil, and a couple of the rooms—the bathrooms, a meditation room that seemed to operate based on complete sensory deprivation, and a couple of supply closets—had no cameras or other surveillance equipment.

They’d been adding more security measures, tearing down walls, and otherwise fashioning the suite into a new situation room for when they had to talk about the spy. It was still a few days from completion, though, and tensions were high throughout the team.

“We’re getting there,” Pidge said, trying to sound bored. That was what Shiro had recommended—to not give any sign that they knew they were being watched. Not everyone was pulling it off. In fact, only Shiro and Meri managed to suppress all signs of unease. But Keith was the worst. Pidge didn’t know what Matt had been doing to keep him calm, but in the week since Matt had left, Keith had virtually never stopped stimming. If he wasn’t on the training deck, he shadowed either Pidge or Shiro, cycling through stim toys like he was trying to find the one that would flip a magic switch in his brain.

Keith growled unhappily, then cursed, and Pidge turned to find him holding the chewer—now in two pieces. He winced. “Sorry.”

Pidge sighed, but managed a smile. “Don’t apologize. There’s plenty more stuff in the drawer over there. Some tougher ones, too. That one was on the soft side anyway, and I don't think the people who made it had Galra teeth in mind.” Keith looked where they had pointed, but didn’t get up from the beanbag. He just closed his fingers over the pieces of the ripped chewer and fiddled with the beanbag’s tag.

When the door slid open, he jumped so high he might actually have caught some air. Shiro stopped two steps into the room, blinking down at Keith, who groaning in frustration and burrowed into the beanbag.

“Everything okay?” Shiro asked.

“Fine,” Keith grunted.

Shiro turned to Pidge, who shook their head. If Shiro hadn’t already noticed what a mess Keith was, then Pidge would eat their webcam, and nothing Pidge could add would do any of them any good.

After a moment, Shiro picked his way toward Keith, claiming a seat on the edge of the beanbag. “Want to talk about it?”

Keith lifted his head, lips pulled back in a snarl. “There’s nothing to talk about. I’m _fine._ ”

“Sure, sure.” Shiro patted Keith’s ankle. “Want to spar, then? I could stand to shut my brain off for an hour or two.”

"Didn't you need to talk to Pidge or something? You didn't come here to ask me to spar."

Shiro shook his head and stood. "It can wait. Come on."

Keith narrowed his eyes, staring at Shiro like he was trying to figure out the trick. But he’d said it himself—anything was better than sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop. He huffed, then accepted Shiro’s hand up, glanced at the ruined stim toy in his hand, and shoved it in his pocket.

“Have fun beating the hell out of each other,” Pidge said, already turning back to their computer. “Weirdos.”

* * *

Wyn was, admittedly, a little bit suspicious when Lance invited him to come see the Blue Lion—and with good reason. Sure, Maka was invited, too, which made the whole thing a little less intimidating, but the looks Lance sent Wyn’s way seemed to carry more weight than the ones directed at Maka.

Maka agreed before Wyn could figure out what Lance was after, but that was okay, because Wyn probably would have agreed in the end, anyway. The Blue Lion’s Quintessence was soothing, and sometimes when she purred at Wyn, he could almost see alien landscapes unfolding behind his eyes. He’d snuck down to her hangar in the middle of the night twice now, and both times, she’d lulled him back to sleep, and instead of Haggar’s experiments, his dreams were filled with Blue herself, prowling around him like a yupper on watch.

Maka apparently hadn’t been to see the lions since he first came to the castle-ship, and he spent the whole walk to Blue’s hangar sprinting ahead of the other two, then bouncing on his toes and shouting for them to hurry until they caught up.

“A _lion_ , Wyn!” he cried, waving his hands over his head. “Do you know how _cool_ that is? They’re, like, _huge!_ Edi says they’re alive, and I don’t know if I believe her, but wouldn’t that be _awesome?_ ”

Wyn just smiled, ducking his head at Lance raised an eyebrow in his direction. True, Wyn had known right from the start that the lions were special—that Blue was, anyway. She’d flown herself to come get him after Lance put Wyn in the paladin armor and shot him out of the hangar on Haggar’s ship. Even then, scared out of his mind and barely processing what was happening, Wyn had felt something from her, like a warm blanket wrapping him up tight and telling him everything was going to be okay.

Lance was probably wondering why Maka hadn’t heard that story—Maka himself would have been angry if he’d known Wyn had held it back. They were always telling each other stories, Maka more than Wyn, though Wyn had a few good ones from when he’d traveled with his parents.

But the stuff with Blue felt too private to go telling everyone about.

They eventually reached Blue’s hangar, and Wyn stopped, his head tilting back as his eyes went wide. He always forgot how big the Blue Lion was, the way she filled the room in more ways than one. She seemed bigger than ever in the full light of day. “ _Woah,_ ” he breathed, gaping up at her. She seemed amused by his response—at least, the air in the hangar _felt_ amused, which was a weird thing for Wyn to think, but it was _true._

“You wanna see inside the cockpit?” Lance asked, dangling it like a prize.

Maka spun, his hands pulled in tight. “Really?”

“Sure. Hey, beautiful, mind if we join you?” Lance was walking even before Blue’s head started to move, dropping toward the ground in a smooth arc that left Maka gaping. He stared at Blue, then at Wyn, as though he wanted to be sure he wasn’t the only one seeing this.

Wyn just smiled and followed after Lance, Maka scurrying to catch up. Once in the cockpit, Maka made a beeline for the pilot’s seat, running his hands over the control panel. Wyn should have been scared Maka would accidentally send them rocketing into a wall, or would fire a laser that destroyed an entire wing of the castle, but he knew without really knowing _how_ that Blue wouldn’t respond to anything Maka did.

“You like it here,” Lance said, his eyes steady on Maka but his voice low enough that only Wyn would hear. “Don’t you?”

Wyn frowned. “With Blue? Yeah. She’s… nice.”

Lance nodded. “Yeah, she is. Real good at making me feel better when things are blah.”

Wyn stiffened, knowing at once what Lance was poking at. He knew, of course. The paladins all did. They all knew who had captured Wyn before Lance rescued him, and they knew the sorts of things she did, even if Wyn had never told them the specifics of what he’d been through.

They worried about him. Wyn saw the looks Coran gave him, the way Shiro and Matt got sad when Wyn was having a bad day. He tried not to think about it, because thinking about it made him feel sick to his stomach, but he wondered sometimes, just how much they knew. Did they know about the nightmares? Did they know sometimes at night he got lost in the castle—in all the little machines that made it up? He was better about staying inside himself these days, but sometimes it was too hard to focus on the physical, especially with Quintessence and the whir of electronics loud in the air.

Sometimes, when he... _wandered_...he came down here, and Blue caught him and pulled him into her, holding tight until he remembered himself enough to find his way back to his body.

“Hey.” Lance turned Wyn toward him, putting a hand on either shoulder. “You don’t need to talk about it if you don’t want to, okay? I just want you to know that I’m here if you ever need me, and so is Blue, okay? You come find either of us whenever you like, and we’ll do whatever we can to help you. Deal?”

Some of the guilt that had pulled tight in Wyn’s chest, curling around his secret visits to Blue, released. “Deal,” he said, and leaned into Lance’s chest as Lance wrapped him up in a hug. It felt nice, just to be held like this, like Lance had held his brother and sister when they’d still been on the castle-ship. Like Wyn's parents used to hold him. It felt like when Coran put a finger to his lips and let Wyn stand at the control pedestals for a few minutes when no one else was looking.

It felt like having a family again.

* * *

Eli and Akira put out the first promotional video two days later.

Pidge knew this because their mother told them. Apparently Eli hadn’t thought about anything else for the last week, and she was starting to grow concerned about whether or not he was still eating and sleeping.

She probably didn’t realize how much _she_ talked about it, but Pidge was willing to forgive that, considering she apparently had to hear about it nonstop. For Pidge’s part, they knew only the basics. They were embarrassed to say they’d stopped paying attention to most of what their mother told them, and they buried their nose in their computer whenever Akira brought it up at mealtimes.

They wanted to spread the word about Voltron. What more did Pidge need to know?

Well, apparently they were going to have to watch this video soon, because within six hours of the first transmission—a limited release, because no one knew what to expect with something like this—they had three calls for help and a handful of smugglers offering their services. For a fee, no doubt, but still. It was something.

The rest of the week was a blur of activity as the castle-ship flitted around the region. Zarkon had a weak grip on the nearby planets—or at least the ones that managed to get in touch with Voltron—but that didn’t mean they could let their guard down. Three days in, when Shiro had split them into two groups to handle two calls for aid simultaneously, a robeast showed up, the first since the battle for Earth. Pidge, Ryner, and Keith had raced across three systems to reach the others and form Voltron to take it down, and the distraction nearly cost them their own battle.

Which wasn’t to say they weren’t making progress. They freed a dozen worlds in under a week, and though they didn’t have time to stay and set up defenses on each one, they put them in touch with Olkarion and the other technologically-advanced free planets. They had a nice little start to the Coalition here, and two planets even promised to build up their armies to join the fight if Voltron needed them down the road.

Zarkon, of course, wasn’t taking this lying down. He might not have put in a personal appearance at any of these battles, but he sent reinforcements—warships, robeasts, druids, and a new fighter model that was faster and packed more of a punch than what the paladins had seen before. (Keith and Lance had a competition going to see who could knock out more in the first five minutes of battle. Keith was winning despite lacking a co-paladin—or perhaps _because_ of it; Pidge was one hundred percent certain Nyma sometimes deliberately missed a shot, and in so doing pushed a cluster of fighters directly into the path of Red’s flames.)

All in all, things were going well.

Unfortunately, it left very little time for other projects. Namely, Pidge’s search for their father.

“I know it’s important and all,” Pidge said, sprawling across Green’s controls after the latest mission. Ryner had already left, issuing a gentle reminder that dinner was in fifteen minutes. “It’s just frustrating.”

Matt made a sympathetic sound, and Pidge wished, fleetingly, that he was still here so they didn’t feel so overwhelmed. Talking over the long-range comms, in the rare event that they were both free at the same time, couldn’t hold a candle to curling up together with a Disney movie playing in the background and a laptop propped up on Pidge’s knees showing buggy code.

“I’m sure it won’t last long,” Matt said. “Think of it this way: every planet you free is one step closer to a Coalition that’s strong enough to tackle all these little distress calls without Voltron.”

“I guess that’s true...”

Matt sighed. “I know that doesn’t help right now.”

“Not really, no.”

“Well, what are you working on? Maybe I can do some of the heavy lifting for you.”

Pidge pulled their feet up onto their seat and fiddled with a knob near their nose. “I’m not, actually. Working on anything. I finished picking through the results from my last algorithm, but it didn’t turn anything up. I need more data points if it’s gonna do me any good.”

“That makes sense.” Matt scratched his chin, glancing off to one side. Pidge could see the shadows on the wall that said Val, Allura, and Edi weren’t far away. It was like the videos from the cockpit of the _Persephone_ , where Shiro had drifted into frame whenever Matt was recording, cracking jokes and making faces where Matt couldn’t see them.

“I’m not giving up,” Pidge said, pouting at the camera. “I just need more time to think through the problem.”

Matt puckered his lips. “I hope that’s not code for, ‘I’m going to skip meals and skimp on sleep to work on this.’”

“ _No._ ” Pidge huffed, resting their chin on their elbows. “No one would let me do that, anyway.”

It had started with Ryner, and occasionally Shiro, popping into Green’s hangar with a quiet invitation to take a break, but now Lance’s mom had gotten in on the game, and Pidge hadn’t yet built up an immunity to her disappointed face. So regular sleep schedules and three square meals it was, at least for now. Which left them with a hard drive full of useless records and precisely zero ideas for how to squeeze answers out of them.

“I’m sorry, Pidge,” Matt said.

“’s not your fault.”

“Still. I’ll try to come up with a new angle, okay?”

Pidge managed half a smile. “Sure. Thanks.” They glanced at the clock hanging over their desk, which was visible through Green’s viewscreen, and groaned. “Speaking of dinner, I should probably get going, or I’m gonna be late.”

“All right.” Matt knocked twice on the table, and Pidge responded in a pattern that was pure habit at this point—a code they’d developed for when Matt was in space and audiovisual communication was limited to the daily uploads. Matt and their father had found a way to sneak Morse code signals under the Garrison’s radar, and over the course of their father’s career, they’d developed their own shorthand.

Two dahs: the letter M. It was Matt’s usual sign-off, and Pidge always responded the same way: Two dits, pause. Two dahs, pause. Two dits and a dah. I-M-U.

_I miss you._

Matt’s answering smile was distinctly misty-eyed, and Pidge scrubbed at tired eyes before the tears had a chance to gather.

“Miss you, too, Pidgeon,” Matt said. “Call me whenever, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“As soon as you learn magic, you mean,” Pidge said. The smile that crept into their voice this time came easier, especially when it was answered by a genuine spark in Matt’s eyes. Pidge sat up, emotions calming. “I’m expecting some real David Copperfield shit when you get back.”

Matt chuckled, and Pidge ended the call before they lost it completely. Sensing the end of the conversation, Green dropped her head toward the ground, and Pidge trudged out. They stopped by their desk, however, eyes sticking on their laptop. There wasn’t really enough time left before dinner to make any progress.

Then again...

It was Meri who showed up twenty minutes later, arms crossed and eyebrows inching toward her hairline. That was new. Not going for a guilt trip, then?

“Just a minute,” Pidge said, hurriedly typing out a few more notes in the document they had open. They’d come up with a few ideas for next steps—still all in their infancy, but a couple of them really had some promise, and they didn’t want to forget anything while they were suffering through dinner.

Meri quietly stepped up behind Pidge, leaned over their shoulder to hit save, and shut the laptop lid with a snap. “Dinner,” she said. “It’s twenty minutes, Pidge, don’t make me carry you.”

She would have, too. Pidge only needed one glance at Meri’s face to know she wasn’t playing around. So with one last look at their laptop, Pidge forced themself to stand and shuffle out into the corridor. Meri kept pace beside them, humming brightly, and Pidge tried not to be mad at her.

When they reached the elevator, to Pidge’s surprise, it wasn’t empty. Coran and Thace were within, Coran hunched down into his collar, his arms crossed over his chest. Thace stood straight-backed beside him like a guard.

Pidge shot a pointed look at Meri, who ignored them.

“You too, eh, Green?” Coran grumbled.

Pidge leaned against the wall beside him, cocking their head to the side. “Me too…what?”

“Coran was thinking of skipping dinner,” Thace said, pulling out his knife and using the tip to clean out under his claws. “Claimed the castle couldn’t run another half a varga without him.”

Coran bristled. “Have you _seen_ the list of things that need to be done? We’re taking on more passengers than a snargonian in winter!”

“Which is what we have the maintenance crew for.” Thace picked a speck of something too small for Pidge to see off his knife and blinked at Coran. “You need food.”

With a snort, Meri leaned back against the railing, her legs crossed at the ankles. “Good luck with that. This one seems to think they can survive on adrenaline and wishes.” She jerked her thumb at Pidge, who stuck their tongue out in response.

Coran came out of his grumbly shell long enough to give Pidge a sympathetic look. “Still stuck, are we?”

“I just don’t have a big enough data set. If we hit a few more prison worlds, or a regional command center or something, I might be able to get somewhere, but as it stands...”

“What are we looking for?” Thace asked. He flinched when Pidge looked up at him and went back to staring at his knife. “My apologies. I shouldn’t pry.”

Pidge tried to be mad at him, really they did. But he shied away from people the same way Keith did, and Pidge couldn’t help feeling for the guy, at least a little. It couldn’t be easy to land in the middle of a ship full of teenagers, especially considering the things Thace had been through prior to his arrival on the castle-ship.

They heaved a sigh. “It’s fine. Not like everyone else doesn’t already know.” They leaned their head back against the elevator wall, wrapping their arms around themself. “My dad was captured when Matt and Shiro were, except we can’t figure out where they sent him. I’ve been trying to go through the prisoner records I have for a clue, but it’s like I’m searching the bridge when I don’t even have the blueprints for the rest of the ship.”

“You’re saying you need more records?”

“Yep.” Pidge popped the _p_ , the fight draining out of them. “Not that that’s gonna happen anytime soon. Gotta help all these worlds in distress before we go planning another prison break, right?”

Thace was quiet for a long moment, and Pidge silently watched the numbers tick by on the display over the elevator door.

“I might be able to help you with that.”

The breath rushed out of Pidge’s lungs, and they turned, voice failing them as Thace stuck his knife under his claw one more time. This time, the tip of the blade caught on something, and he slid a tiny data chip free, holding it up between two fingers.

“My sister doesn’t know I kept this. I should have destroyed it as soon as I sent her the last few files, but I don’t like to destroy information. You never know when it might come in handy.”

“Is that…?” Pidge licked their lips, taking a hesitant step toward Thace. “Prison records?”

“Among other things.”

“And you’re just gonna… give it to me?”

“Yes.” Thace closed his fist over the data chip and lifted it over his head—a good four feet beyond Pidge’s reach. They glared at him. “ _After_ dinner. We’re going to eat, and then I’ll come make sure the files transfer without problems. Deal?”

Elation bubbled over, pulling Pidge’s face into a grin and resonating in their muscles. They darted forward, squeezing Thace around the waist. “Deal!”

Thace went rigid under their touch, the ding of the elevator loud in the silence. Before Thace had a chance to recover, Pidge broke away, jogging backwards and pointing a finger at him.

“You promised. I’m going to hold you to it.”

Then they turned and took off for the dining hall at a sprint, Coran’s laughter following after them.

* * *

The requests just kept coming.

Shiro had stepped away for less than an hour—long enough to get dinner, to take a shower, to let his eyes stop stinging from the endless scroll of coordinates and calls for help. When he returned, there were thirteen new distress calls waiting for him.

He stared at the list for a full minute, fighting back a headache and a crushing desire to scream. This was _good._ This was what they wanted. To know who was still fighting, who might be willing to stand up to Zarkon. To spread hope, to make Voltron an icon the universe could rally around.

Unfortunately, that only worked if Voltron _answered_ these calls for help.

Rubbing his forehead, Shiro took a seat at his paladin station and brought up the new distress calls, reading them through one at a time. The first step was to sort them into calls that could be handled by one or two lions, and those that would require all five. (There was no guarantee, Shiro knew, but he had to start _somewhere_ , and they couldn’t all go to every planet, or they’d never make any progress at all.)

An hour later, he’d finished his first pass, adding two to the file labeled _Voltron_ and the other eleven to the _Solo_ file.

There were fifteen new distress calls this time.

Shiro groaned, letting his head thunk back against the headrest. It was fine. He could handle this. They’d averaged two calls per planet so far—some planets put out as many as a dozen calls, either from people sending repeat signals or from fragmented resistance groups each reaching out independently. There weren’t actually _that many_ planets that needed them. Not in this small section of space, anyway. Eli and Akira hadn’t know what sort of response to expect, so they’d started small. Just five percent of the Galra Empire, a little sliver tucked way off to the side, away from the major Galra presence.

Just five percent. That was all.

The headache was building now, his vision fizzling behind his eyelids as he struggled to keep his cool. He wished, quite suddenly, that he hadn’t told Allura to go. He’d thought he would be fine without her and Matt, but he hadn’t expected something like this. He hadn’t expected Akira to have his own influx of Guard volunteers to vet, or for Coran to suddenly have to put out a hundred fires that the maintenance crew uncovered as they slowly reopened the unused wings of the castle.

He was so tired, but the thought of going back to his room and trying to fall asleep without Matt there beside him left him feeling antsy. He’d slept poorly the last few nights, and he knew the fatigue was making this work harder than it needed to be. Maybe he should call it a night, get a fresh start early in the morning.

Except by then, he’d have hundreds of distress calls waiting for him. He’d never catch up.

“That sort of day, huh?”

Shiro gave a start and turned to find Lance standing in the doorway, a water pouch in hand. He was still dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt, but he’d traded his sneakers for lion slippers.

“Lance,” Shiro said, sitting up and rubbing his face to try to get rid of the bleary-eyed look he was sure had overtaken him sometime during his work. “Hey. Did you need something?”

“Just this,” Lance said, handing Shiro the water pouch. Shiro stared at it, but Lance wasn’t done. He nudged Shiro’s arm with a closed fist, and when Shiro held out his hand, Lance dropped two pills into it. “Tylenol. Mamá brought a pharmacy, and I saw the way you kept squinting at dinner.”

Shiro flushed. “I’m fine, Lance. I--”

“It’s a headache, Shiro, not a dereliction of duty.” Lance sighed, then took back the water pouch and poked the straw through the foil seal. “Come on, buddy. You’re still human.”

There was no arguing with that, but it didn’t stop Shiro trying. He stared at the water pouch for a long moment before taking it back from Lance, sighing, and swallowing down the pain killers. It was ridiculous to get hung up on this, anyway. It still felt wrong to acknowledge weakness—any weakness—in front of his team, even though they’d already seen him at his worst. _Because_ they’d seen him at his worst, maybe. Without Allura here, the mantle of black paladin rested squarely on Shiro’s shoulders. He couldn’t allow any doubt to fester about his ability to lead them in this war.

“So what are you doing here?” Lance asked, taking a seat on the arm of Shiro’s chair. He balanced remarkably well on the narrow perch, one foot propped up on the very front of the armrest, the other leg crossed over at the knee. He produced a second water pouch, poked it with a straw, and took a long pull as he scanned the displays. “Distress calls?”

“Sorting through the new ones we got today,” Shiro said, barely curtailing a flinch as a new alert chimed, indicating another incoming call. “Just… trying to get a head start on tomorrow’s work.”

Lance nodded, sucking on his water pouch for a few more seconds before he leaned forward, wobbling a bit, and swiped through Shiro’s windows. “Solo versus team missions, I gotcha.” He bobbed his head, calling up a few individual files and skimming their contents. “Okay, yeah, I totally got this.”

“You… what?”

“This.” Lance gestured at the screen. “You’re beat, Shiro. Don’t deny it. How many of these have you sorted through already, huh?” A flick of the finger sent the solo mission list scrolling past dozens of entries. Lance’s eyebrow climbed higher with every passing second. “Go get some rest. I can play traffic controller with the calls for room service for tonight.”

Shiro blinked a few times at the mixed metaphor, then shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, Lance, but it’s fine. I’ve got this under control.”

“Ah.” Lance dropped his hand, wiggling the straw between his teeth a few times. “Right. Gotcha.”

Shiro stopped, his own embarrassment falling away as he recognized the thin composure in Lance’s voice. He turned, and while he expected the open concern on Lance’s face, the uncertainty caught him off guard. What did Lance have to feel unsure about?

Oh.

Shiro winced, massaging his temples. “It’s not that I don’t think you can do it, Lance.”

“No, I know,” Lance said quickly, an easy smile wiping across his features in an instant.

“You shouldn’t have to give up your evening is all I’m saying.”

“And I _totally_ get that.” Lance swung his legs off the arm of the chair and stood. He’d long since finished his water, but he still fiddled with the straw, not meeting Shiro’s eyes except briefly, as he flashed a smile that said, _Don’t you start worrying about me._ “Anyway, I should get out of your hair.”

Shiro breathed in, forcing his own pride to quiet down for once. “Lance.”

Lance stopped halfway to the door, turning around with a wary look on his face.

“You’re right.” Shiro stood, combing his fingers through his bangs. “This headache is really getting to me, and I should probably try to sleep it off.”

“Yeah?” Lance perked up at that, biting his lip.

“Yeah,” Shiro said. “Don’t feel like you have to do anything, but… if you really don’t mind looking through some of the distress calls, I would appreciate the help.”

A dazzling smile burst out of Lance, and he jogged back over, a bounce in his step. “Yeah, totally! I don’t mind at all, no way.”

Shiro nodded. “Okay. Don’t stress about it too much—we already know any one of these missions could have a surprise that sets us all scrambling to back each other up. Just go with your gut.”

“Got it.”

“And don’t stay up too late doing this, okay? An hour or two, and then you get to bed, too. Understood?”

Lance flicked a salute and turned the screen toward him, already pulling up the list of unsorted calls. “Roger that. Hour an a half, and I’m gone.”

“Okay.” Shiro hesitated, watching Lance click through to the contents of the first message. It felt wrong to walk out on this, to leave his duty to someone else.

But his head was pounding, and he’d probably have been less than useless to Lance, even if he had stayed. He forced himself to turn and walk out, calling a good night to Lance, who answered in kind.

Shiro was halfway to his room when he stopped, quite suddenly, at a branch in the hallway. Maybe it was the empty bed waiting for him in his room. Maybe it was the painkillers he'd taken, and the tacit admission of weakness that went along with them. Maybe he was just an arrogant fool at heart, too proud to admit when something was beyond him.

His feet carried him to the memory pod room on the bottom floor of the castle, and he stopped in the door, heart pounding.

This was a bad idea.

He knew it was, but it didn’t matter. He would not let fear rule him. He wouldn't shy away from his past, hide from who and what he was. This team needed a leader, and a leader couldn't afford weakness. Of any kind. Besides, the first session was only an hour long. He could survive an hour in his past. An hour was nothing.

Mind made up, he turned to the comms panel beside the door and keyed in Coran’s frequency. “Hey,” he said when Coran opened the channel. “Can you meet me in the memory pod room?”

Coran, thankfully, reserved judgment until Shiro laid it all out for him.

"I know--given what I have lurking in my head, I know this could go wrong."

"And there's no shame in that," Coran said. "A great many paladins experience some form of battle shock. That's why, in an ideal world, we'd have set up your profile as soon as the Black Lion chose you. It's easier to handle traumatic memories during the transfer if you're already familiar with the process. You can actually control a great deal, given enough practice."

"Practice I don't have," Shiro said.

Coran laid a hand on his shoulder. "I won't stop you from doing this. I understand why it might be important to you." He pulled out a palm-sized screen and tapped it against Shiro's arm. "I can monitor the status of your transfer from here. Things get hairy, and I'll pull you out early. Chalk it up as a learning experience, and if you want to try again in a few days, you'll go in armed with a little more knowledge than you have now. Yeah?"

Tension pulled taut between Shiro's shoulder blades, but he managed a smile for Coran. For the little screen in his hand--portable. A silent declaration that he liked Shiro's odds for lasting through the session. No reason to wander away if he expected to pull Shiro out in five minutes, after all. It was a small thing, but it bolstered Shiro. "That sounds fair."

Coran nodded. "One more thing, then. If I _do_ have to pull you out, would you prefer I'm the only one in the room, or...?"

He left the alternative unspoken, but it reminded Shiro of his promise to Allura. He wouldn't bottle things up. He wouldn't try to handle everything alone. "You can call Akira. But--Just the two of you."

"Of course." Coran clapped him on the back, voice brightening in an instant as he turned to ready the pod. Shiro's heart beat faster, but when Coran waved him forward, he moved without hesitation.

No fear.

He was better than that.

* * *

“It’s time.”

Keith’s blood froze in his veins, his body locking up as he stared at the comms screen where his mother sat, hands pressed together beneath her chin. The comms deck was eerily silent, the other stations watchful vacuums at the fringes of Keith’s awareness. He wished somebody else were here—Pidge talking to their mom, Akira conferring with Eli, Lance catching his family up on the day’s events.

It was a stupid thing to wish for, considering Keena never would have said a word if she weren’t positive they were alone. She was too cautious for that.

“Time?” Keith’s mouth ran dry, and he had to wet his lips before he could go on. “For…?”

Keena smiled, the tips of her canines catching the light. “Yes. I’ve been getting reports from our agents on the homeworld. Things are about to boil over. If you leave now, you can position yourself at the front of that tide when it finally rises.”

_But why does it have to be me?_

Keith couldn’t get the words out. Keena’s stare pinned him to the seat, stealing the breath from his lungs just as it had last month on New Altea. He didn’t want this.

And she didn’t care.

* * *

_She called him “Keithka,” and the diminutive grated on his nerves even as it awoke a longing in him he hadn’t thought still existed. A longing to have a mother who would fight the universe for him, a longing to make her proud. He hated how weak it made him feel, sitting there across the desk from his mother, a sword hilt heavy in his lap. Thace stood vigil in the corner, eyes burning holes in the back of Keith’s head, and Keith was keenly aware of the empty space to either side of him._

_Suddenly, he didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be alone._

“ _A mission?” he asked, the words tripping off his tongue like sandpaper, his throat closing off as his mother pinned him with a sharp, critical gaze. “What sort of mission?’_

“ _The Galra homeworld is unstable, and only growing more so with every passing movement.” Keena pressed a button on the edge of her desk, and a hologram appeared in the air between them: first the planet itself, shattered down to the crystal core, with dozens of irregular moons orbiting it. Then, beside this image, more appeared. Still images of crumbling cities and rank upon rank of sentries, video of street brawls, protests, and finely-dressed politicians giving speeches to crowds of sullen Galra dressed in rags._

“ _The homeworld is corrupt,” Keena explained. “Zarkon’s already throttling the planet for resources, and the military command he put in charge of the planet siphons off even more to feed their opulence. For most people, the army is the only way they’re ever going to make it off-world, so Zarkon’s been pushing recruitment harder and harder there. Last year, almost half of his new recruits came from the homeworld.”_

“Half? _” Keith asked, feeling cold. The faces in the photos spoke of desperation—and suddenly he remembered a conversation he’d once had with Lance. Keith had told him the Empire had no draft, that everyone they fought had signed up for this war willingly. That Lance didn’t have to feel guilty for killing them—because, after all, they weren’t innocents._

_Keith felt sick, but he leaned forward, hand closing around the hilt of the sword in his lap._

“ _You want me to go there,” he said. “To help them.”_

_Keena tipped her head to the side, humming thoughtfully. “They’ll be better off for our work, certainly, though this isn’t exactly a humanitarian mission. We don’t have the resources for that.”_

_That made sense. New Altea was a prosperous planet, from what Keith had seen, but it was relatively small, and it didn’t have the fleet, trade routes, or political connections for large-scale aid. “Okay, so… what? Sent Voltron in, liberate the planet, the way we did on Berlou?”_

“ _Vrekt, no. The situation on the homeworld requires tact, Keithka. You’ll be leading a small strike force—two or three agents, tops.”_

_Keith’s enthusiasm faltered. “Agents?”_

“ _The best I have available,” she said, beaming. The expression faltered a moment later as she registered Keith’s confusion. “You were expecting to take your friends.”_

“ _I mean… yeah. We work well together.”_

“ _They’ll never blend in on a planet full of Galra, kitka.” Keena leaned forward, splaying one hand on the desktop. “I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a long time, you know. You can trust me.”_

_Keith wrapped his arms around his midsection, nodding. “Yeah. I know. I just--” He bit down on his words and shook his head. “You’re right. Sorry. Small strike team.”_

_With a bland smile, Keena regarded him for a long moment. Searching for something, maybe. Keith couldn’t say what. “There’s a revolution building on the streets of our planet. It could erupt any day now. You need to be there when it happens. Help them overthrow Zarkon’s government, then get yourself appointed head of the new one.”_

_Keith recoiled, her words refusing to parse. “Head of the—_ what? _I can’t run a government! I’m a paladin.”_

“ _And I’m_ _proud of you, Keithka,” Keena said. “More than you could possibly know. That title’s going to go a long way to establishing your reputation among the rebels. They’ll be happy to follow you!”_

 _Keith shook his head, still reeling. “You don’t get it. I’m a_ paladin. _I can’t waste time with politics when my team needs me to help them fight Zarkon’s army.”_

“ _Oh, Keithka.”_

_Keith bristled. “What?” he demanded, “I have a duty, Mom. I can’t just abandon them! I’m not--”_

I’m not you.

_Silence rang loud in Keith’s ears, and they folded back against his scalp, his pulse jumping in his throat. He opened his mouth to apologize, then thought better of it and slumped in his seat. Behind him, Thace sighed, the sound prickling along Keith’s neck. He scowled at the holograms projected over his mother’s desk._

“ _Keith.” Keena’s voice was hard, and she turned off the projector before she continued, leaving Keith nowhere to look except at her. His gaze settled on her hands, which were folded beneath her chin. “You’re new to this fight. I get it. All you can see is the battle right in front of you. And that’s_ fine— _it’s gotten you this far, hasn’t it? But you have to learn to see the big picture.”_

_Keith’s gaze flicked up, taking in the unreadable steel edges of her expression._

“ _Tell me something. What’s more useful to your team: one paladin, or an army of thousands?”_

_Keith’s mouth ran dry. “An army.”_

“ _And if you had a chance to raise them that army, wouldn’t it be worth a couple phoebs away from Voltron? I’m sure Matt Holt can keep things running while you’re gone.”_

_Questions rose to the tip of Keith’s tongue-- How did Keena know about Matt? How much else did she know about Team Voltron? How long had she been watching Keith—and why hadn’t she tried to get in touch with him before now?_

_He shoved all these questions aside, focusing instead on the most important. “You want me to raise an army. From the homeworld?”_

“ _Naturally. Half of Zarkon’s recruitment, remember.”_

_Keith swallowed, his stomach turning flips inside him. The hologram was gone, but he could still see the images of hungry, desperate people. People who went to war—why? Not because they believed in Zarkon’s goals, that was for damn sure. Maybe they were trying to feed their families, or pay for medicine. Maybe they were chasing friends, parents, siblings who had left before them. Maybe—maybe they just wanted to leave the homeworld. It was a dead planet, after all, and everyone said the crystals they imported to sustain the city enclosures were cheap and prone to failure. Staying there had to be a death sentence._

“ _You want me to conscript them?” Keith asked._

 _Keena’s ear flicked once. “Of course not! We aren’t the Empire, Keithka. You have to give them something to believe in. Something to_ fight for _. Make them jump for the chance to be part of the future.”_

“ _They don’t need a reason to fight,” Keith said. “They need food. Or somewhere to relocate to.”_

_Keena clapped her hands. “That’s perfect! Sell it to them just like that—a defensive force to make life better for everyone on the homeworld. Some to protect against Zarkon’s retaliation, some to go out and find supplies to bring home.”_

“ _I don’t understand why they need to fight at all. Haven’t they suffered enough?”_

“ _It’s not about suffering,” Keena said. “It's about putting us in a position to bring down Zarkon once and for all. It’s about making the homeworld a symbol. Tear down Zarkon’s regime, unite our people into an army that stands in defiance of his rule.” She leaned forward, her voice dropping low. “The homeworld is only the beginning, Keithka. Without it, Zarkon’s going to be scrambling for soldiers. He can’t rely too heavily on those sentries of his; he needs live soldiers, pilots, officers,_ technicians. _And with his flow of fresh meat cut in half, he’s going to start leaning on the other pockets of Galra scattered across the universe. The ones who’ve reaped the benefits of this war without having to sacrifice their children. Push hard enough, and he may have to enact a draft—the first in five thousand years.”_

_Understanding crystallized in Keith’s chest. “They’d never stand for it,” he whispered._

_Keena smiled. “Never in ten thousand years. They’ll look at Zarkon with his drafts and his dwindling armies, and then they’ll look at you. It’ll be slow at first, but there will be little pockets of defectors. Small forces that pledge themselves to you in exchange for a promise of aid, should Zarkon try to force them back in line. And that will inspire others to hop ship._

“ _That’s when you challenge Zarkon directly. That’s when you name yourself Emperor and wrest control of his armies away from him.”_

* * *

Emperor Keith.

Just thinking the words brought a foul taste to his tongue. _Him_ , the emperor. A warlord. A Prince, just like his dad had tried to teach him to be. What scared him was how easy it was to picture. He'd fought to be a part of that world for so long, not because he wanted it but because there was nothing else. He was a poor excuse for a Prince, sure, but that wouldn't have gone on. Sooner or later, someone would have challenged him for his title, and he knew himself well enough to know he wouldn't have stepped aside without a fight.

He could have been that man. He could have commanded an army that had slaughtered billions. He could have fueled their bloodlust, directed it. He'd been born to it.

But it hurt that, after everything he'd done to change, after fighting tooth and claw to break free of his father's legacy, after all the heartache and uncertainty, after winning his team's trust, after finally, _finally_ feeling like he'd found himself--

After all that, his mother still looked at him and saw the Prince.

Red’s fury swirled in his chest, burning all Keena’s plans to ash. Red pressed her convictions into him, echoed Matt’s words back at him. _She doesn’t know you, Keith, and she sure as hell doesn’t own you. So honestly? Fuck her. She can do her own vrekking dirty work._

Keith breathed in, letting the fire fill him. It was too much to contain—anger and protectiveness and defiance blazing so high he was sure he’d split at the seams—but it steadied him.

“So?” Keena asked. Her smile was bright, her ears completely unreadable, but the barest hint of a growl crept into her voice. “My agents are ready to leave at a moment’s notice. They can meet you at the homeworld by morning.” She cocked her head to the side, smile sliding out of place as though to mock him. “What do you say, Keithka? Can I count on you? Can your team count on you?”

Keith closed his eyes, letting himself slip into the bond. Red was furious at Keena, furious on so many levels that Keith couldn’t begin to grasp why. But the anger was only the surface. Beneath was something calmer, something cooler. Keith plunged into this calm, trying to steal some of it for himself.

 _They are suffering,_ Keith thought, willing Red to understand. _Zarkon’s exploiting everyone on the homeworld. I can’t just ignore that. And… she’s right. This would be a symbol. I won’t be what she wants me to be, I_ won't _force them to fight, but if we unseat Zarkon from Galra itself--_

 _**It would change things,** _ Red said. She sounded petulant, and Keith smiled, opening his eyes to find his mother staring back at him.

Heart pounding, he raised his chin, drew on Red’s strength, and met Keena’s gaze. “I’ll go,” he said. She beamed, opening her mouth to respond, but Keith plowed on ahead. “But I don’t need your agents. If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it my way.”

Keena’s face darkened. “ _Keith._ You don’t know what you’re getting into. Let me--”

“You wanted me for this mission,” he said. “Well, this is who I am. If you want things done your way, then you can have your people deal with the situation.”

He waited, heart in his throat, and was almost disappointed when she didn’t order him to stand down. “I’ll send you what information I have,” she said instead, resentment tugging at her ears. “Let me know if you change your mind about the strike team.”

“I won’t,” Keith said, and ended the call.

* * *

Coran advanced his dreadnought by two blocks and ordered a strike on Thace’s last command post, grinning as the other man scrambled for a defense.

“Terribly sorry to do this to you,” he said, leaning back in his seat and smoothing his mustache. “Though I did warn you—I’m the reigning _eshet_ champion here on the Castle of Lions. You put up a good fight though, I have to say. You sure you’ve never played before?”

“Before yesterday?” Thace asked, scratching his chin. He was still surveying the board, though he was down to his last threatened command post, a single bomber, and half a dozen one-man fighters. He’d taken out a good portion of Coran’s fleet, but only a single command post. Thace hummed, directing his fighters toward the dreadnought. They impacted one by one, their status bars disappearing as they turned into so much scrap metal. “Never heard of it.”

Coran chuckled, keying in the final command. His dreadnought opened fire on Thace’s last command post, which flashed red, then dissolved into static. “And that’s game.” Coran stood, stretching his arms over his head. “Castle takes the day.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Coran froze, the quiet confidence in Thace’s voice giving him pause. Technically, Thace did still have one turn to attempt to turn the game into a draw. Coran scanned the battlefield, but Thace’s sole bomber wasn’t in a position to hit any mission-critical units, so what…?

Abruptly, all five of Coran’s surviving command posts flashed red, then went gray, indicating complete systems failure. Five alerts popped up in rapid success, each indicating airlock failure, followed by total crew loss.

Thace smiled.

“What?” Coran cried. “How?”

“Sent a team into the first base I destroyed,” Thace explained. “They picked through your systems to find something we could exploit. I’ll admit I was worried I wouldn’t be able to stall long enough.”

Coran snapped his mouth shut, scowling at the board. “The fighters?”

“Necessary risk,” Thace said. “The command override for the airlocks had to be sent from a ship with your credentials. Two of my pilots managed to make it onto your dreadnought, and from there...”

The battlefield faded, final results scrolling by over top. Coran’s forces were still in better shape than Thace’s—though not by much—but it was, officially, a draw.

Coran sniffed, then dropped back into his seat and reset the _eshet_ sim. “Well. I suppose we’ll just have to have a rematch, then, won’t we?”

Before he could suggest the next scenario, Coran’s gauntlet began to beep, and his heart plummeted as he recognized the pattern.

“What is it?” Thace asked.

“Problem with the memory extraction protocol,” Coran said, already halfway to the door. “Sorry. We'll have to do this some other time.”

* * *

_Shiro tasted blood._

_He retched, shivered, shoved the horror away until he was back safe in his prison cell, where the guilt couldn’t kill him. Right here, right now, he couldn’t afford it. Not if he wanted to live._

A memory.

_They’d pitted him against three opponents today. That was growing more common as more and more challengers fell beneath the Champion’s blade. The Galra wanted a show, and Shiro was too good to lose to any single opponent, so they let the other prisoners team up. The daily matches turned into brawls, with two, three, and four to a side. Shiro didn’t know how many had died already, but he knew how many had risen to face him. The number was burned into his soul._

This was just a memory.

_He faced three Scarlias today—a humanoid species with thick tusks and long claws. For once, Shiro actually had a size advantage, and though he was faster than the Scarlias, the three of them could easily flank him. He’d taken two bad hits already—a gash across his shoulder that made his prison uniform cling to blood-slicked skin, and a crushing blow to his elbow that made it hard to grip his sword._

_His opponents worked well together, signaling with gestures and wordless grunts. Shiro kept in constant motion, though his lungs already strained for air. The open wound on his shoulder burned as sweat poured into it, and his head was swimming from the blood loss._

_That was okay. He’d given as good as he got. Two of the Scarlias were limping. All were on the verge of collapse._

_This fight would be over soon._

This wasn’t happening. He was in the memory pod, and he’d only gotten caught in a memory. He’d tried his best to avoid the memories that were tainted with blood and despair, and for the most part he’d succeeded.

Not this time, though.

_The Scarlias charged—one head-on, one coming up behind him, one scaling a shattered stone pillar to drop down on Shiro from above._

_Shiro broke into a sprint, ignoring the flash of pain and blood as the he smacked the first Scarlia’s blade aside, aggravating his swollen elbow and opening up a fresh gash along his forearm. Shiro swung underhanded with his sword, coming up beneath his opponent’s frail guard and splitting him open._

_Someone screamed as red-orange blood painted the sands._

It wasn’t real. He wasn’t doing this again.

But the pain was so sharp, the bitter taste of blood overpowering in his mouth. Shiro shuddered, and for a moment, he was aware of his real body, the one suspended in the memory pod. He caught a glimpse of a blue-tinted room, of fogged glass, like the frost that decorated an active cryopod. (But hadn’t Coran said these pods didn’t use cryosleep? Maybe he was sweating in real life as he was in the memory.)

_Shiro didn’t stay to watch the first Scarlia bleed out. He turned, raising his sword to meet that of the second Scarlia. They danced, circling each other, Shiro on alert for the last opponent. They must be sneaking up on him, surely. Any moment now…_

_His opponent lunged, and Shiro moved on instinct, deflecting the blade, reversing, bringing his own weapon down. The second Scarlia dropped without a sound._

Shiro tried to stop himself from turning, tried to pull out of the memory before--

_He turned, adrenaline singing in his blood, and found the third Scarlia on his knees, cradling the body of the first opponent Shiro had downed._

“ _Bastard,” the man hissed. He raised his head, tears in his eyes. His sword lay forgotten ten feet away, and with the corpse pulled onto his lap, there was no way he could move should Shiro choose to strike._

_Shiro didn’t move._

_The Scarlia stared up at him, lips pulling back in a snarl. “They were my children.”_

_Shiro’s breath stalled in his chest. He remembered the desperation with which this man had fought. He was injured worse than the other two—_ had been _injured worse, before Shiro killed them both. Shiro hadn’t thought much of it, but the man had taken hits meant for his children on more than one occasion._

_Looking at him, Shiro was reminded of Commander Holt. Of the way he’d fought on the day they were separated, the way he thrashed against his guards’ hold and run to Matt, pulled him close for one last embrace, and whispered that everything would be alright._

_A tiny red dot appeared on the man’s head, and from the way his eyes lifted to Shiro’s forehead, another had appeared there. Shiro couldn’t see the snipers from the Arena floor; they would be stationed in the upper reaches of the stands, far from any danger. They had one job in a match like this._

_Make sure Shiro followed through on the kill. If he refused, then both he and his opponent got a laser between the eyes._

“ _Do it,” the Scarlia spat. “I’ve nothing left to live for, anyway.”_

The memory shattered as Shiro raised his sword, a shock of cool air washing over his skin. He teetered, the world spinning around him, but it was too late. He saw the final blow, tasted the Scarlia father’s blood, felt the weight of another death settle into his bones as he was led back to his cell.

He hated them. All three of them. Hated that they made him feel guilty, hated that they reminded him of the Holts. What had they expected to come of challenging him, anyway? Even if they’d won, the Galra would have made them turn on each other. There could be only one Champion.

“I need you to breathe, Shiro. With me, now.”

Coran’s voice fizzled at the edges of Shiro’s awareness, but he forced himself to focus. He breathed, letting Coran set the pace, and slowly the hand around his throat let up. His vision cleared, and he shot a look around the room, his eyes landing on Akira, who stood just beyond arm's reach, frozen. Icy shame washed over Shiro, battling with relief so strong it left him light-headed. Things were always easier with Akira.

But Akira had never seen him like this before. He'd seen some. The smaller things. The way Shiro froze sometimes, losing track of the present. The times when he grew tense for no reason, when the shadows of his past turned everything into another challenger on the sands.

He hadn't seen any of Shiro's panic attacks, though. Shiro had been doing better lately. The last few weeks, the only bad episodes came at night, when the dreams slipped in behind his defenses.

“I’m sorry.” Shiro struggled to his feet, accepting Coran’s offer of help, and wrestled with his expression. Akira shouldn't have to see this. He shouldn't have to know how broken Shiro was. Never mind his promise to Allura; Shiro shouldn't have asked Coran to send for him.

"How can I help?" Akira asked. His voice was small. Too small. He didn't sound like himself. He sounded like he was trying not to shatter, and it was all Shiro's fault. Akira hesitated. "What do you need? You need me to talk? Make some tea? You want a hug?"

"No," Shiro said, more sharply than he meant. He pulled away from Coran as soon as he had his balance, his skin pulling tight across his body. "Not--No. I'm fine." His voice cracked on the word, and his hands shook so badly he could barely hold the water pouch Coran handed him.

Akira opened his mouth again, then shut it, his eyes full of pity and pain. Shiro wanted to apologize to him again, wanted to rewind time and stop himself from ever getting into that pod. He should have just gone back to his room and tried to make himself sleep.

Suddenly it was too much. The pressure to be the black paladin. The suffocating patience and pity staring back at him.

"I need to go."

Neither Coran nor Akira stopped him, and he left without another word. Head down, heart pounding, he walked the silent corridors in the bowels of the castle. Black called to him from up ahead, and he pushed himself faster, faster, until he was sprinting through the halls, fleeing the specters of his past, fleeing his own scars.

Black already had her mouth open when he spilled into her hangar, her purr filling up the cracks in his soul. He tripped over his feet as he raced up the ramp, and once he reached the cockpit, he stopped, breathed in. It was the first full breath he’d taken since fleeing the pod room, and it left him light-headed.

He gripped the back of the pilot’s seat, swayed. Then he sat down, bowing over the controls as Black crooned in the depths of his mind.

 _**Safe,** _ she said. _**You are safe.** _

_I know. I’m sorry._

She prodded him with a gentle reprimand, assuring him he didn’t need to apologize for this, but Shiro couldn’t shake his embarrassment. He was better than this.

Allura’s absence was an empty space in his mind, and he reached for it, reached _through_ it, as though he could find her all the way across the universe if he just tried hard enough. He wished he could borrow her strength, her calm. That’s what they’d always done before, whenever one of them was shaken. The other always had some stability to offer. Without that reservoir now, Shiro suddenly realized how hollow he was.

The light in the cockpit changed. Shiro’s head snapped up as a window opened on the viewscreen before him, washing him in blue light as the comms system searched for a connection. In Black’s mind, Shiro saw what she’d done, and his heart dropped into his feet. He lunged forward, fingers fumbling for the key that would disconnect.

The call went through, Matt and Allura’s anxious faces resolving before him. Shiro felt as though he’d been plunged into ice water, and he sat up straighter, face burning as he realized he still wore the white medsuit Coran had dressed him in for his stint in the memory pod.

“Hey,” Matt said, a little breathless. “Is everything okay? Are you hurt?"

“I'm fine,” Shiro said.

Allura frowned. “Fine,” she echoed. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Then why did you call on the emergency channel?”

Shiro’s eyes flicked to the bottom of the window, where the details of the transmission were displayed. He fought down a groan and hurled a ball of irritation Black’s way. She brushed it off.

“Sorry,” Shiro said. “I think I might have freaked Black out is all. I’m _fine_ , I promise.” He scanned what was visible of the cockpit around Matt and Allura. It was small and dark, but Shiro had seen the ship before they left. There wasn’t much room on it—the cockpit, cramped sleeping quarters, and one small common area and kitchenette. Val and Edi might not be in the cockpit, but they were almost certainly within earshot.

Shiro couldn't do this in front of an audience. Not now.

Matt pursed his lips, glancing from Shiro to Allura as though trying to figure out his best angle of attack.

Allura, though, only sighed, the tension draining out of her. “Well, as long as we have you, I suppose we might as well give you an update.”

Matt stared at her like she’d just shifted into the body of a two-headed alien, but Shiro very nearly went boneless with relief. A status report was just what he needed right now. It was safe. It was familiar. It was something to focus on that wasn’t the storm raging inside him.

The knots in his emotions unraveled one by one as Allura talked. There wasn’t much to say—they’d been to Bilus, the sanctuary world Olkari reports placed the Pygnarat master on. Bilus wasn’t so much a sanctuary these days, but they’d managed to hold out against the Galra, and it hadn’t been difficult to find someone who could point them in the direction the master had gone. Some years had passed since then, but Allura was optimistic about their chances.

A simple report—but Allura took her time with it, talking Shiro through their visit to Bilus, their supply levels, their plans moving forward. She kept her voice bright and matter-of-fact, but it calmed Shiro in a way plain sympathy never could have managed.

By the time she was done, Shiro felt as though he’d found solid ground again, and he smiled as Allura finally trailed off.

“It’s good to hear everything’s going well on your end,” he said. “There’s not much to report over here. You heard about Eli’s video?”

“Pidge mentioned something,” Matt said. “Sounds like people are responding to it?”

“Better than we’d hoped.” Shiro felt a twinge of guilt as he thought of Lance sorting through all those distress calls, but he forced it away. “We’re keeping busy.”

The conversation lulled, and Shiro could see the questions lurking behind Allura and Matt’s eyes. They itched to know what had rattled him so badly Black had put out an emergency call.

They didn’t ask, though, and for that Shiro was grateful.

He was even more grateful when Matt yawned, stretched, and glanced over his shoulder. “Hey, Takashi. It’s almost the end of my shift and falling asleep on this postage stamp of a ship is a nightmare. Talk me to sleep?”

Shiro smiled, and Black purred an agreement in his chest. Talking each other to sleep was a tradition dating back to his and Matt’s Garrison days, when homesickness and looming exams conspired to keep them up. It had continued on the _Persephone_ as they both struggled to find rest in zero-G, and in the Galra prisons as their world fell apart. They’d revived the tradition since becoming paladins, on those nights when their minds were too full of the war to find peace.

There was something soothing about a familiar voice talking total nonsense. Matt liked to make up similes when he was so tired his brain felt, as he put it, “like an apple driving a Jeep.” (Shiro still had no idea what that one meant, but it had made him laugh, which was all that really mattered.)

Matt put him on hold, and Shiro found the pillow and fleece blanket he’d stored in the cockpit as part of Lance’s improvements on the standard emergency kit. He made a nest in his chair while he waited for Matt to change out of his armor and settle into his bunk.

The light was dimmer when Matt reconnected, his smile lopsided as he wrestled his pillow into place so it wasn’t blocking his face. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Shiro said.

“So I saw this statue on Bilus that made me think of you.”

“Oh?”

Matt yawned as he nodded. “Looked like the model rocket you built from that one kit. When you lost the instructions and decided to wing it?”

“Hey, now, that didn’t turn out that bad.”

“Course not. It just so happens you weren’t actually making a rocket. You were imitating the work of a very talented alien abstractionist.”

“Uh-huh.” Shiro shifted in his seat, trying to get more comfortable. Black obligingly reclined the seat, moving the comms screen so he could still see it. “And what was this statue supposed to represent?”

Matt buried a smirk in his pillow and closed his eyes. “Oh, it was commemorating some famous spaceship or another. I guess when they decommissioned it they literally blew it up. Like a multi-billion-dollar firework show.”

Shiro rolled his eyes. “Just because my rocket wasn’t perfectly aerodynamic doesn’t mean it would have exploded on launch.”

“Babe. Sweetheart. Honeykins. That rocket wouldn’t have made it to launch.”

Shiro flicked the screen, and Matt laughed, the sound quickly lost in another yawn. Shiro followed suit, settling into his chair. It wasn’t the most comfortable bed in the world, but with Black’s presence all around him and Matt’s warm, sleepy voice on the comms, Shiro’s tension drained out of him minute by minute. Matt kept talking, fading sometimes to wordless murmurs before he remembered himself, and somewhere between a story about Edi's antics on the ship and a lullaby that felt like home, Shiro finally drifted off.

* * *

He woke some time later to find Akira waiting outside the Black Lion. Shiro's steps slowed as he noticed him, and Akira scrambled to his feet, wringing his hands. They stared at each other, completely lost for words.

"So I've had some time to think," Akira said. "And it doesn't have to be now, but when you're up for it, I want to talk about what I can do if something like that happens again. I don't like not knowing how to help you."

The raw note in his voice, and the way he leaned forward, like he wanted to run to Shiro but wasn't sure he was allowed, resonated in Shiro's core. Whatever shame still lingered over Shiro sloughed off. This was his brother, after all. His twin. If Shiro couldn't trust Akira with this, he couldn't trust anyone.

"I wish I'd thought to have that conversation before now," he admitted, opening his arms in a silent invitation. Akira surged forward, crushing Shiro to him, and Shiro reveled in the sense of safety Akira's embrace brought. "I wish I could give you a step by step guide, for that matter. Mostly I just know what doesn't help."

"That's a good start," Akira said. "We'll figure the rest out together."

Smiling, Shiro buried his face in Akira's neck, breathing through a fresh wave of emotion. He was more rested than he'd been when he left Lance on the bridge, but he still felt run thin.

But Voltron waited for no man, so eventually Shiro disentangled himself from his brother with a quiet thank-you, returned to his room for a shower, then made his way back to the bridge. There he found not only Lance, but Meri and Coran as well. Their faces were grim when they greeted him, and Shiro heaved a sigh as he dove back into the fray.

They called everyone together a few minutes later in the Darkroom—Pidge’s name for the shielded, surveillance-free suite they’d build out in Green Tower. The lock on the door was keyed to the paladins’ Quintessence, which Coran assured them all was impossible to fake, and Pidge had set up a number of redundancies to make sure no one could hack the system, which ran completely independent from the rest of the castle.

It took two paladins to open the door, and anyone whose Quintessence wasn’t on file couldn’t pass through without triggering a lockdown. At the moment, that file included just the paladins, Coran, Thace, and Akira.

“I’m sure by now you’re all aware of the fact that we have a spy on the castle-ship,” Shiro said, once they were all gathered with the doors sealed shut. A massive table took up the majority of the room, chairs ranged around it, with inactive screens and holoprojectors mounted on the walls.

“Are we sure it’s a spy?” Keith asked, his foot tapping a frantic rhythm against the leg of his chair. “Last I heard, we were still looking at whether it could be a surveillance program.”

Pidge fiddled with their glasses, their laptop balanced on their knees. “I’m hesitant to give any definite answer at this point, but there’s no fixed pattern of transmissions, no indication that the Galra command on Olkarion obtained the stolen records from the outside, nothing on any of our scans to indicate foreign tech on the castle-ship…” They glanced up at Shiro with a shrug. “Let’s put it this way: if it’s not a living, breathing spy, then this hypothetical surveillance protocol is advanced enough to anticipate our moves and cover its own tracks.”

“So… probably a spy,” Lance said. “Maybe a robot spy, but still a spy.”

Pidge tipped their head to the side. “I’d say that’s fair, yeah.”

Shiro nodded. “So someone on this ship is working against us. We don’t know who, and we don’t know how. They might have planted recording devices around the ship, or they might have gained access to our security cameras."

"Actually." Pidge hesitated, drumming their fingers on their keyboard. After a moment, they snapped the lid shut and leaned forward. "I hate to be the one to bring this up, but I've been turning this over basically non-stop and I keep coming back to one thing."

"What's that?" Lance asked.

Pidge fiddled with their cuffs. "Wyn."

Coran's reaction was instantaneous. He stood, slamming a hand on the table. "He would _never_."

"I'm not saying he's actively spying on us," Pidge snapped, narrowing their eyes. "I'm saying he was in Haggar's hands for a long time, and we all know she has a track record of leaving a memento."

Shiro went cold. "You think she put something in him that lets her take control?"

"Or just look through his eyes, I don't know." Pidge held their hands up. "I'm just saying we need to consider the possibility. Take a look at his scans. Do some digging."

"You'll have to be careful," Meri said. "If Haggar _is_ in there and she realizes you're onto her, things could get ugly."

"I'll take care of it." Coran sank back into his seat, looking troubled. "I'll review the records from when we first found him. Keep an eye out for an excuse to run more."

Pidge bit their lip. "For what it's worth, it would be pretty easy to remove her influence if it's at all like what she put in Shiro's arm."

That was assuming an awful lot, but Shiro didn't bother to say so. The atmosphere in the room was somber enough already. "Regardless of the specifics," he said, "we have to assume anything we say or do outside this room is potentially compromised. Be careful what you say, and be mindful of who’s around you.”

“The Lions are probably safe, as well,” Ryner pointed out. “They don’t let many people into the cockpits.”

“And they’re not hooked up directly to the castle’s computers,” Hunk added.

“Right.” Shiro leaned his hands on the table. “But we know for a fact that the Empire has at least partial access to our main comms. We don’t know the extent of that access, but we’ve been getting so many calls for aid since the video went out that we have to consider the possibility that Zarkon knows who’s contacted us and is going to retaliate.”

Nyma crossed her arms. “Well, we can’t be everywhere. We’re having a hard enough time responding to the legitimate calls we get.”

And that was the problem, wasn’t it? When Shiro had arrived on the bridge after his nap, it was to a mountain of new requests. “Lance, you want to take this one?”

“Yeah.” Lance stood, drumming his fingers on his thigh. “So we were talking about this. We already have to tackle most of these calls solo, right? There have been a few that need more firepower, but a lot of what we’re doing right now are quick hits. If anything, we’re losing time constantly coming back to the castle.”

Keith cocked his head to the side. “You think we should split up.”

“I mean… yeah?” Lance scratched the back of his head. “If we do that, we can also route distress calls right to the lions. Makes it more secure for the people asking for help, streamlines it on our end so we only ever need to worry about a fraction of the calls.”

“We’d keep each other up on what’s happening, of course,” Shiro said. “And Keith and I would probably team up on some of the bigger missions—our two lions give us more firepower and keeps either of us from getting cut off from the team without backup.”

“And the Guard can handle some of them, too, especially with the castle backing us up.” Akira kicked his feet up on the table, looking thoughtful. “We’ve gotten word from a few small forces who want to ally with us, so that was going to be my big focus anyway. A few diplomatic runs and we can start taking on bigger missions.”

Pidge leaned forward, pushing their computer toward the center of the table. “So we’re doing this?”

Shiro looked around the table, searching each face for objections. Hunk and Shay looked nervous, but they nodded when Shiro’s eyes turned their way; Keith ignored Shiro’s gaze and stared instead at the tabletop. But no one offered an argument. “I think we are,” Shiro said.

“Sweet.” Pidge grabbed their laptop, plugged a cord in, hit a key, and a starmap appeared over the table with a wedge glowing green. “Can we take calls in this direction?”

“Uh...” Shiro glanced at Coran, who was already moving, hands flying across a keyboard at a wall-mounted terminal. A number of red dots appeared, overlaid with Pidge’s map, several of them falling within Pidge’s range. “I don’t see why not.”

Pidge grinned. “Awesome.”

Nyma raised an eyebrow, pulling one foot up onto the seat of her chair. “Something interesting in that direction, or are you just being arbitrary?”

“Well...” Pidge’s head tipped to one side, their eyes darting toward Ryner, who smiled indulgently. “I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up yet, but I think I might have a lead on my dad.”

Shiro’s heart skipped a beat. “You do?”

Pidge grinned, then bit their lip. “Yeah. Thace gave me the intel he collected while he was a spy--" They beamed at Thace, who stood unobtrusively by the wall near Coran. "--and I was able to identify a pattern for where they send people after they're first captured. It’s not a hundred percent, but there’s a good chance he was held in one of these four prisons, at least for a while.” Pidge hit another key, and four dark green dots appeared within the wedge. “If I get access to the records for these prisons, I might be able to find out where they sent him.”

Unexpected hope fluttered in Shiro’s chest. _Commander Holt._ If there was a chance, however slim, to find him, then Shiro would take it. “Do it,” he said, catching Pidge’s eyes. They shone with the first signs of tears, and Shiro offered a smile. “And let us know if you find anything. You know any one of us will come help if you need it.”

“Yeah,” Pidge said, voice choked. “I know.”

They hashed out the rest of the plan quickly enough, assigning sectors for the castle-ship and the other lions. When they came to the last sector, though—the one Keith and Shiro were supposed to take—Keith finally broke his silence.

“Actually,” he said. “I’m not gonna be able to help with the distress calls.”

“What?” Lance asked. “Why not?”

Keith crossed his arms and avoided Lance's eyes. “Because. I need to go to the Galra homeworld.”

A sharp intake of breath drew Shiro’s eye to Thace, who looked like he’d just been slapped. Something passed between Keith and Thace, who gathered himself and said, “I’m coming, too.”

“Yeah,” Keith grumbled. “I figured you would.”

Shiro frowned. There was more going on here than Keith was letting on, but he refused to meet Shiro’s eyes. “What’s on the Galra homeworld?”

“Nothing,” Keith said. “Just… something I have to do.”

Before Shiro could push him further, Meri cleared her throat. “Actually, while we’re talking about things that need to be done.” She breathed in, then out, then raised her chin. “We need someone inside Zarkon’s forces. He’s spying on us, and we’ve got no clue what he’s planning. And if it is Wyn they're using, we're probably going to need the files from the experiments he was in."

“Woah, woah, woah.” Nyma held up a hand, her jaw dropping. “You want to go spy on the Galra Empire?”

“I’ve done it before,” Meri said. She firmed her jaw, meeting the incredulous looks flung her way. “We need a leg up in this war. Don’t deny it.”

Shiro couldn’t. Nor, it seemed, could anyone else. That didn’t stop Coran from pulling Meri aside for a brief, hushed, conversation. Meri stood firm, though, and Coran eventually backed off, looking devastated. He glanced around the room and, once satisfied there was nothing more to be said, left without another word.

* * *

Meri left early the next morning, before any of the others were up, and Keith hurried to follow her example. To get out of here before Shiro asked, again, if he was sure about this, if he wanted the team to come with him. (He did, but he couldn't ask that of them. Not when he was already taking the Red Lion, and with her the possibility of forming Voltron. This was important, but so were all the other planets calling for aid.)

Unease still simmered in Keith’s gut. It had chased him everywhere for days now, keeping him up at night, making him shy away from shadows like they might hide enemies. Even now that he’d made up his mind about his mother’s mission, he still got the lingering impression that he was making a mistake.

Normally things were better when he went to see Red. She was pure, compacted energy, constant motion, raw passion. She didn’t have time for things like worry or fear.

Today was different. Today the Red Lion was taking him away from his friends… his family. Today his throat closed up as he stepped into her hangar, his heart beating erratically in his chest as he loaded up rations, medical supplies, and a small arsenal of explosives. He didn’t know what he might need on the homeworld, and Thace was less than no help.

Thace.

Red eyed him with suspicion, and the anxious storm inside Keith quieted for a moment as they regarded him together. Keena would have ordered him to come along, of course. She wouldn’t just let Keith walk away without someone to report back on him. Well that was just fine. Keith had been expecting the tagalong, and he could deal with it if he had to. Hell, Thace was an experienced spy, and it wasn’t as though he wanted to hurt Keith.

Keith would just have to watch his back. Trust no one, not even his own uncle. He’d done that for most of his life, anyway.

He just wished he could make everything feel a little less like it was all going to come crashing down on his head.

Abruptly, the anxiety vanished, the pressure in his chest letting up between one heartbeat and the next. Keith staggered, sucking in a deep breath, and pressed a hand to his head.

“What the hell?”

Shame. Horror. A frantic apology. They beat at Keith’s mind, five kinds of frantic overlapping in a torrent of regret.

Keith looked up at Red, and it was like the world suddenly tilted on its axis, the pieces falling into place. _Red?_ he asked. _Was that…?_

_**Sorry.** _

_So it was you? The last couple of days—that’s all been coming from you?_

Red didn’t want to answer, but he could see the truth in her silence. He could feel the fear raging in her core. She was _terrified._

 _Why?_ he asked, searching back for an explanation. She’d never been like this before. Not until-- _Matt. Is it because Matt’s gone? Is that why you’re freaking out?_

 _**Don’t worry,** _ she told him. _**Not your problem.** _

“Like hell it’s not,” Keith growled, glaring up at her. “Is he in danger? Is something wrong?”

 _**No.** _ Red’s voice grew muddied, falling somewhere far short of actual words. A flurry of images and emotions drifted by the outer edges of Keith’s awareness: Matt leaving on the shuttle with Allura, Val, and Edi. Keith piloting Red away from the castle. A stately Altean woman—Keturah—standing in an empty hangar, her back to Red. There were enemies all around, and Red ached to fight, but her systems were fried, her core almost depleted of power. Keturah turned to look back at her, smiled, and was swallowed by the darkness.

Keith reeled back, panting like he’d just run a marathon. Red crooned, dropping her head low.

 _**Alone,** _ she said, and pressed more images into the bond. Images of Zarkon, of Keena and Thace, of Shiro’s face as he stood before them all and spoke of the spy on the castle. _**Secrets. I don’t like secrets.** _

Keith’s heart constricted, and he reached up to rest his palm against her nose. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to lie to them, I just--”

_**No.** _

Red’s voice stopped his apology in its tracks, and she drew his attention to Thace, who stood in the elevator door, a travel pack slung over his shoulder.

_**Secrets. You should not be alone.** _

Oddly, that loosened the panic in his chest. He could feel it still, seeping into him from Red, but it wasn’t so overwhelming now that he knew where it was coming from. He looked up at her and smiled, trying to impart a sense of comfort. “I won’t be alone, Red. I’ve got you.”

She rumbled, mournful and noncommittal, but it was too late to change his mind now. The people of the Galra homeworld needed help, and Keith was going to offer it to them.

Keith squared his shoulder as Thace approached, unwilling to show his hesitance. Red bristled, but Keith soothed her. They would watch him. They would be ready for a trick, though Keith wasn’t honestly expecting one.

It wasn’t an ideal situation, and Keith’s heart ached as he turned to climb the ramp into Red’s cockpit. But he would survive. He was used to taking care of himself.

“Wait!”

Keith froze at the sound of Lance’s call. His hand tightened around a support bar behind Red’s teeth, and for a moment he couldn’t bring himself to turn, to shatter the illusion that Lance was running after him.

The approaching footsteps slowed just a few feet away. Thace turned to give Keith an inquiring look.

With a deep breath, Keith turned and found Lance standing there, bag in hand. He shuffled his feet, and one corner of his mouth turned upward in a smile. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“You got room for one more?”

A wave of gratitude took Keith by surprise. Gratitude and fondness so strong it took his breath away. He opened his mouth to answer and found only tears gathering behind his eyes.

_**You should not be alone.** _

Lance’s smile wavered as the silence stretched on, and he glanced over his shoulder. “Uh… sorry.” He laughed feebly. “I’m not—I didn’t really think this through. I’m sure you’ll be fine on your own out there, I just thought… You seemed…” He covered his face with one hand and groaned. “This is stupid, isn't it? Ugh. Sorry, just--Ignore me.”

“No,” Keith said, choking on too many emotions. It was too much. His mother's demands, his uncle's secrets. Matt gone and Shiro already stressed beyond what any of them could have asked of him. And Lance. Lance, who saw him, saw the truth of him, and came running anyway. “Lance, I’m… I’m glad you’re here, really.”

“You don’t need to lie, Keith. Look, I don’t know what’s so important about the Galra homeworld, but I totally get it if it’s the sort of thing you need to do alone or whatever. You can just tell me to leave. I don’t mind, really.”

He took a step back, his shoulders angling like he was about to turn and walk out the door, and Keith’s mind short-circuited. He couldn’t find the words to say what he wanted to say—that he desperately wanted someone to come with him, someone he could trust. That Lance was very near the top of that list--now more than ever.

All he knew was that he couldn’t let Lance walk out that door. So he did the only thing that came to mind. He lunged forward, grabbed Lance’s wrist, and pulled him into a kiss.

Lance froze, and for a moment, Keith’s mind roared with panic. This was a mistake. He shouldn’t have done this, and now Lance was going to--

Lance's bag hit the ground with a thud, and his free hand came up to cup the back of Keith’s neck, his fingers tangling in his hair. Keith’s heart hammered in his throat, and Lance’s raced to catch up, playing a countermelody against Keith’s chest.

They broke apart, and Keith stared at Lance, his ears quivering with too many emotions to name.

“Wow.” Lance blinked, a dopey smile stealing across his face, and spreading a warm, quiet blanket over Keith’s racing thoughts. “So I guess that’s a yes on the coming with you, then. Bet you want to keep me away from all the other eligible aliens, huh?”

Keith snorted, punched Lance’s arm, and grabbed his bag off the ground. “You caught me," he said dryly. "Now get your ass in the lion, Sharpshooter. We've got a government to overthrow.”

**End Act I**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Act II picks up six months after this chapter, and it's gonna be a ride. Before that, though, we're gonna have an interlude to check in on the team over the course of the time skip. That's going to go up as a side story called, "Paths May Cross," starting next Monday and updating every Monday and Thursday for the next four weeks. So keep an eye out for that. Updates here will resume once we're done with the interlude.


	16. Nezai

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... After releasing a video designed to spread the word of Voltron's return, the paladins parted ways. Keith, Lance, and Thace went to the Galra homeworld, where a rebellion is brewing. Keith has rejected his mother's plan to set him up as a new emperor, but he knows better than to think she's given up so easily. Meanwhile Hunk and Shay have been splitting their time between the Castle of Lions, where they continued to search for the spy, and occupied worlds that have issued distress calls.
> 
> Six months have passed since then.

_The end began with solitude._

_Somewhere, distantly, there was the awareness of what had come before. Pain and sorrow and a mounting horror that lurked just out of sight. The others were dead, or were dying, or would soon die; it was hard to say how much time had passed since Lealle had  
_

**_No._ **

_A wash of pain swept the thought away, burying it under a mountain of grief and guilt. No one could have done anything differently; no one had known what was coming. Still there were dangling what-ifs and if-onlys. “If we’d know.” “If we’d been there.”_

_If the guilt hadn’t blotted out the truth, if denial hadn’t forestalled intervention._

_It hadn’t had to come to this._

**_Stop._ **

_It was too late now. Now was solitude and silence, the dark hangar cast in red-tinted gloom by the particle barrier that had gone up almost at once. Awareness flickered on the edge of oblivion, pain staving off true sleep._

**_Why?_ **

_Keturah was gone._

**_I don't understand._ **

_Keturah was gone, her mind closed off, the bond severed quickly and cleanly before it could be twisted into Zarkon’s service. It was necessary, but that didn't stop every gear and conduit in her soul rage against it all. The loss still throbbed somewhere deep down, an edge of impotence, of sinking sorrow that kept the rest at bay. Keturah was not yet dead, but it ached as though she were, and the pain didn’t lessen as the days crawled by._

_There would be no rescue; not now, and not soon enough to matter. The only thing to do was send the bayard back to the castle, where it would be safe until Keturah’s successor appeared._

_After that, there was nothing but the pain._

* * *

Keith woke slowly, remnants of the dream crumbling away like aged lace. The images had deteriorated near the end, nightmares blending with what must have been Red’s memories until they created a horrorscape of golden eyes and pain and Keturah herself appearing to beat against Red’s shield, begging the lion to let her in.

Something in him stirred at this last image, unease mingled with guilt that crested in a delirium of semi-conscious malaise that tapered off as he dredged himself out of bed.

 _Red?_ he thought, rubbing sleep from his eyes. _What was that?_

She sent him an indistinct apology, but she was too far away for anything more. Far enough that he seldom sensed her as anything more than a pellet of compacted fire in the deepest corner of his mind. He was more surprised by the dreams than upset over them—though of course his chest ached for the reminder that Red had lost her last paladin to violence and grief. Keturah had thrown herself against Zarkon’s fleet after Lealle’s death, too lost in her grief to see that she was only destroying herself. Red was reluctant to speak of the details, and Keturah’s AI knew nothing of those last days. Her body had been lost with the Red Lion, so there had been no chance for a final memory transfer.

What little Keith did know came from Coran’s own telling of Zarkon’s betrayal—and Keith wasn’t about to press him for more details.

Whatever had happened must have scarred Red more deeply than she let on if she was dreaming about it now, and dreaming so loudly the echoes reached Keith here in the heart of the 301—one of the larger habitable enclosures dotting the homeworld’s surface. They’d had to hide Red in the vast, uninhabitable wilderness between dome-cities, and though Keith never completely lost track of her presence in his mind, he’d gone whole days without communicating with her directly.

She’d hated letting Matt fly off without her; with Keith now out of her reach for months on end, she was almost inconsolable.

She shrank back, tugging on the shreds of her memory as though to tuck them away where Keith didn’t have to look at them. He prodded again, briefly, uncertain if the dream had been the byproduct of their deepening bond, which allowed Red to pass along surface-level memories, or if Red had just been dreaming of the past.

Whatever the case, she clearly didn’t want to talk about it, and Keith was in no position to press the issue. The clock beside his bed lit up as he reached toward it. It was still early, but after the nightmare, he doubted he would find sleep again. Better to get an early start on the day's preparations.

Thace was already up when Keith emerged, as usual. When they’d first established this small apartment as their base of operations in the 301 and Thace had claimed the living room for his bed, Keith had worried about disturbing him, but Thace seemed to thrive on next to no sleep. Keith wasn't honestly sure he _did_ sleep; if he did, it wasn't when Keith was around to witness it.

Keith nodded as he headed for the storage locker that held their ration bars. In the six months they’d been on the Galra homeworld, his relationship with Thace had eased. Keith still didn’t entirely trust his uncle, and he certainly wouldn’t call them close, but they’d fallen into a rhythm and Keith no longer tensed up any time he was left alone with Thace—due, in large part, to Lance’s early efforts at peacemaking. Keith and his uncle shared a loathing for icebreakers, but Keith had to admit, grudgingly, that they had done their job and sparked a conversation, awkward though it had been.

It was easier now that Thace didn't feel so much like a stranger. They’d reached a truce, and if Keith still wasn’t wholly convinced Thace wasn’t sending daily updates back to Keena, he at least trusted the man to have his back when they went out on a run.

That didn’t make it any less a relief when Lance woke half an hour later and joined them in the kitchen with a chipper _good morning_ as he leaned in to kiss Keith on the cheek.

Keith’s face burned, his ears lying back as he shot a self-conscious look at Thace, who at least made an effort to seem focused on his holopad, though one ear was cocked toward Keith and Lance.

It wasn’t that Keith didn’t appreciate Lance’s kisses—the giddiness that came whenever their hands brushed up against each other still hadn't quite faded—but the last six months had been so full of chaos and a mad scramble to make contact with the local resistance that there hadn’t been a whole lot of time for… well, anything. Certainly not for settling into this relationship. Having Thace around didn't help any.

Fortunately, Lance was nothing if not understanding, and he didn’t seem put out by Keith’s hesitance. He just smiled, trailed his fingers along Keith’s arm, and went to get himself a ration bar before taking a seat beside Keith at the small table.

“So,” Lance said. “Who's ready for some breaking and entering?”

* * *

“And what if the Galra return? We have no army. We can't fight them off!”

“We don't have a choice,” Minister Tchell said, folding their arms over their chest. "We're at war with the Galra, whether we want to be or not." Their thin, buzzing voice was difficult to read, but Hunk could hardly miss the biting resentment in their words--and in the glittering, four-eyed glare the minister show his way. Hunk had been trying not to draw attention--he wouldn't be here at all if the remnants of the Shlanndan government hadn't dragged him and Shay to this emergency meeting. Now a dozen gazes turned his way, and Tchell’s frond-like antennae swayed in satisfaction. “I don't suppose we can expect aid  from the illustrious paladins of Voltron in the future?”

Tchell didn't pause long enough for an answer, but the jab was a step too far. Hunk was exhausted from two days of battle. He was sore, he was emotionally drained, and he honestly just wanted to go back to the castle and sleep for a week.

But no. He had to sit here and smile for the crowd of terrified Shlanndans who were counting on Voltron to show them how to cope with their newly-won freedom, and to top it all off, Minister Tchell had spent the last hour taking every chance to insinuate that Hunk and Shay were the enemy.

Indignation pooled in Hunk’s chest, and he straightened, ignoring Shay’s restraining hand on his arm. “Of course we'll help you if Zarkon comes back," he growled. "That's what we _do_. And don't act like we started this fight. Zarkon already had his claws in Shlannda. That’s why we’re here, y’know? Because _your people_ called us and told us all about how the Empire’s been dragging your engineers off to work for the empire? How he’s stripping your planet of resources and paying you a tenth of their worth?”

“Hunk,” Shay whispered. “I do not think that--”

“Oh, wait,” Hunk went on. “Oh, that’s _right_. You’re the ones who got paid to let Zarkon’s people walk all over you."

Tchell’s ear-frond-things stood suddenly upright, their four compound eyes narrowing. A low clicking hiss gathered in their throat, echoed by several other of the Shlanndan ministers. They were a curious species, somewhere between amphibious and insectoid with an extra pair of legs and chitinous plates on their torso, and the effect of their angry vocalization was something like a swarm of pissed off hornets. “What are you implying, _Paladin_?”

“Nothing,” Shay said quickly, humming what some corner of Hunk’s mind registered as a soothing melody. Yellow added her voice to the song, somehow managing to convey an image of a giant cat grooming a disheveled kitten.

Hunk gave them both the mental equivalent of a glare and stepped forward to meet Tchell. “She’s right. I’m not _implying_ anything. You _know_ what you did. You turned your back on your own people. I think the real question we need to ask now is whether or not you're going to turn around and sell out your planet for a chance at getting back in Zarkon's good graces." Hunk held up his hands as the angry chittering intensified. "Hey. Join the Coalition or don’t. Frankly, I don’t care. Unlike you, Voltron isn’t in the habit of profiting off the suffering of regular people. We’ll put you in touch with people who can shore up your planetary defenses, we’ll come fight for you again if Zarkon’s cronies come back. So don’t go pretending we’re the bad guys here because we actually did something about the situation.”

Shay fluttered her hands, trying to soothe the antennae quivering over Hunk’s rant, and he let her take over. Hunk was done. Done with Tchell, done with the ministers. Done with being a punching bag for the people who’d been perfectly happy with Zarkon’s status quo. At least a few of the ministers seemed emboldened by Hunk’s words. They quickly shouted down Tchell’s spluttering retorts, moving the conference along to more practical concerns: sorting out food, medicine, and shelter for the people who had been displaced by the fighting or by the occupation the fighting had put an and to.

At least Vich and Illor, the ranking Guardsmen on this mission, seemed amused by the whole thing. They’d directed half a dozen reconstructions already, and they slid easily into the discussion with amiable smiles and concrete suggestions that had another large portion of the assembly coming out of their doom-and-gloom shells.

Shay’s eyes remained steady on Hunk, who retreated to his earlier position off to one side. The ministry’s ceiling had caved in during the battle, leaving a large stretch of sky visible, the day fading into a fiery sunset. He sighed, the anger going out of him, and hummed an apology.

"You don’t have to say anything,” he said, reaching up to massage his forehead. “I know I could have handled that better.”

“You are tired,” Shay said matter-of-factly. A simple statement, but the commiseration in her song mattered more than any words she might find. Shay was tired, too. The battle on Shlannda had dragged on for nearly a week, the last two days without a lull, and neither of them had managed to snatch more than a few scattered hours of sleep since it began. This wasn’t the worst Hunk had seen since becoming a paladin; the people here at least mostly kept their lives and their freedom. But it was exhausting, and Tchell’s passive-aggressive jabs couldn’t have come at a worse time.

Fortunately, the meeting didn’t last much longer. Vich and Illor got approval for their work and left to gather volunteers for relief efforts; the ministers dispersed, Tchell and their closest allies giving Hunk one last round of dirty looks: and Hunk and Shay trudged back to where they’d left the Yellow Lion.

The city, once a bustling urban center, looked now like the remains of an ancient castle, towering walls still standing strong beside heaps of rubble. The fighting had been at its most intense here, and most of the populace had sheltered in basements and cellars, which had fared better than the surface levels, on the whole--though nowhere had been truly safe.

Hunk tried not to think about the death toll, focusing instead on Yellow’s presence up ahead and the promise of a good night’s sleep.

Soon. They had a few more things to take care of before then.

Some of the locals had gathered in the plaza where Yellow had touched down, though only a handful of children had ventured beyond the deep shadows between buildings. These few scattered at Hunk’s approach.

“It’s okay,” Hunk said, crouching down so he was on eye level with the bravest of the bunch, a green-plated child who couldn’t have been out of their toddler years if the wide-eyed wonder and faltering steps were any indication. “You want to meet Yellow?”

At a sharp click from one of the bystanders, the child pulled their arms in toward their chest, then turned and ran for the edge of the plaza with the waddling gait of the lacals. Hunk sighed, but he was way too tired to chase down a bunch of kids to make sure they knew that they were welcome to hang out with Yellow if they wanted to.

So he just stood, aching muscles protesting the motion, and followed Shay up into the cockpit, where she waved for him to take the pilot’s seat. She crouched beside him, resting easily on her haunches. Hunk still hadn’t figured out how that was comfortable for long periods, but it seemed to be Shay’s resting posture, and he was tired enough to take the chair without complaint. With a little bit of fumbling across the controls, he opened a connection to the Black Lion.

Shiro answered almost immediately, which meant he must have already been in his lion—either out on a mission of his own or talking to one of the others. Hunk wracked his brain, trying to remember whether Shiro had been in the middle of something last time they talked, but all he turned up was a long stretch of battle and exhaustion.

“Hey,” Shiro said, a little breathless. His eyes roved over Hunk and Shay, taking in their stooped posture and the bags under Hunk’s eyes. “How are things going?”

“Fighting’s over for now,” Hunk said. “The last of Zarkon’s forces pulled out a few hours ago. Akira’s guys are helping get a start on reconstruction. We’re supposed to ask you to have Coran get in touch with Olkarion for the whole defensive package thing.” Hunk waved a hand and slumped down in the chair. They’d been through this often enough that Shiro would know what Hunk was asking. Nothing could compare with the defenses surrounding New Altea—and now Earth—but Olkarion was a close third, and they had a sizable rotation of engineers they sent out to newly-liberated worlds to guard them against retaliation. A quick call from Coran, and Shlannda would have its very own defensive system before Hunk burned through this sleep debt.

“We’ll get right on it.” Shiro paused, and Hunk shook himself once he realized he’d been dozing off. Shiro smothered a smile. “What about the two of you? You look exhausted.”

“We are,” Hunk said. "Especially with politics."

Shay smacked his leg. “It was a long fight, but we came through unharmed. All that we need now is a bit of rest.”

“You’ve more than earned it,” Shiro said. “How _is_ the political landscape looking? Think the Shlanndans might consider joining the Coalition?”

Hunk’s face burned. “Uh… about that?”

Shiro frowned.

“I… might have kinda gone off on the ministers a little bit. They were trying to make us out to be the bad guys, Shiro! Why do they do that? Every time. It’s always, oh, you got our people killed. Oh, no, now Zarkon’s gonna hate us. You should have just left us to suffer and _die_ at the Empire’s hands. I mean, what the hell!”

“I know,” Shiro said. “Believe me, I do.”

Hunk pulled one foot up onto the seat and wrapped his arms around his leg. “I just don’t get it. They can’t actually _want_ things to stay the way they were. Can they?”

Shiro blew out a long breath, his gaze drifting to something out of frame. “Some of them do. The ones who were in power before you got there. You’ve noticed the pattern, right? Zarkon doesn’t make life miserable for everyone. He can’t, or his empire would have collapsed a long time ago. Regimes like this, they… Well, they survive by making sure most people are happy enough not to cause problems, and by reminding the ones that toe the line of rebellion what happens if they draw the wrong sort of attention.”

“So they’re okay with letting people starve because Zarkon tosses the ministers a bone every now and then.”

“Not all of them. Not even most of them, usually. And the stronger the Coalition gets, the more we prove that liberation is a sustainable option, the more people are going to get behind the idea.” Shiro refocused on Hunk, his face wan and deeply lined. Hunk wondered how many times he’d faced situations just like this—many of them on his own. Until recently, Shiro and Coran, and sometimes Akira, had handled all the diplomatic details.

Hunk had offered to handle things on Shlannda after Lance’s last message. He’d talked to Shiro recently, Lance said, and the guy looked like he was running himself into the ground. _Probably doesn’t like to let on, but if there’s anything you can do to lighten the load…_

Hunk hadn’t needed to be asked twice, but now that he was here, dealing with career politicians who only cared about their cushy little Imperial bonuses... Well, he hadn’t been expecting this.

“Zarkon made it so everyone had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo,” Shiro said, sympathy in his voice. “Most of these people have never known anything different, and what they have heard is stories of people who tried to fight back and got themselves killed. When you live like that, it doesn’t matter if your life isn’t great. It’s better than it could be, and you’re afraid to go looking for trouble.”

Shay squeezed Hunk’s ankle, tired understanding seeping into the song. “I understand their hesitance,” she said. “I see now that my people are better off for Voltron’s intervention, but it was so hard to believe that things could change. Rax, he… My brother’s fears about punishment were not unfounded. If you had been unsuccessful, if the Galra had driven you off before you could finish your work, it would have gone poorly for us. We had seen it happen before.”

Hunk’s stomach knotted as dim memories rose in the bond. Whispers of slaughter, Balmerans strung up in the mine shaft as examples. Shay’s grief and an old, stale fear rose to choke him, and he wilted.

“The greatest defense Zarkon has is his control over the communications network,” Shiro said. “Which is why our fight is so difficult. As long as the Empire controls the narrative, we have to start from scratch on each world. But remember that there _are_ people there who wanted this. Who _fought_ for this. The ministers lived in a world of their own, and their views don’t necessarily reflect the way the planet feels. You should talk to them, to the average people, after you’ve rested. It’ll make you feel better.”

Hunk managed a smile, even as he fought down a frustrated impulse, a wild, angry urge to tear down the Shlanndan government and set up something better. He felt ashamed even before the thought had fully formed, and he dismissed it at once. Shiro and Allura had had this conversation with them all before, back when they were all first splitting off for solo missions.

Voltron’s purpose was to fight the Galra Empire, to drive them off, not to take their place. The paladins were not to get involved with the actual governing of these planets, even if the people asked them to. Alliances were one thing, but the Coalition was not going to turn into another empire.

Hunk sighed, burying his face in his arms. “I suck at diplomacy.”

Shiro chuckled. “It’s a learned skill, Hunk, believe me. You’re not the only one who just wants to grab some of these people by the shoulders and shake some sense into them.”

Startled, Hunk looked up, surprised at the wry smile on Shiro’s face. That, plus the muffled giggle from Shay, was enough to draw a smile out of Hunk, and he cocked his head to the side. “Really? You always seem so… composed.”

“I’ve got a good poker face,” Shiro said, “and Allura’s taught me how to navigate the double-talk and social dances of the political world.” He reached up and rubbed his neck, his expression going sour. “Don’t get me wrong, I still hate it. But I’ve come to realize it’s a good skill to have.”

Hunk heaved a sigh. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Hey.” Shiro dropped his hand, going suddenly intense. For a moment, Hunk almost felt like he could sense Shiro’s mind brushing up against his, though they were separated by galaxies and Allura wasn’t there to unlock the Black Lion’s full potential. “You don’t have to force yourself to do this. I appreciate the help, but it’s not worth it if it makes you miserable. I can swing by Shlannda in a few days, and we’re trying to put together a summit to talk to all our allies and potential allies at once. So don’t stress about it.”

Guilt curdled in Hunk’s gut, barely assuaged by Shay’s silent solidarity. Here he’d been trying to give Shiro a break, and it had backfired on him spectacularly. “No,” he said. “I want to do this. Maybe it’ll be easier when I’m not dead on my feet.”

Shiro snorted. “That would help, yeah. It’ll always be frustrating, but… Hunk, you may not think it now, but if I can learn diplomacy, then you definitely can.”

“You think so?”

“I do. You and me, Hunk? We don’t take anybody’s shit—and that’s a good thing, as long as you can put it to work for you. You’re passionate, and you care about the people too many politicians ignore, and you stick to your convictions. Yeah, you’re gonna ruffle a few feathers. Honestly, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. All you really need is to learn how to speak the language of politics. To engage these people in a way that will make them listen to you instead of dismissing you as just some alien kid who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Hunk flushed despite himself, fumbling to come up with a response. “Thanks, Shiro. That—that means a lot.”

“It’s the truth. Call me again after you’ve slept, and I’ll give you a few pointers. Or maybe get Allura to do it, if she’s free. She’s way better at this sort of thing.”

Hunk smiled. “I’ll do that.” He broke off in a yawn that tugged at his center, nudging him toward sleep. “But, yeah. Sleep first. Shay, you…? Oh.” He looked down to find Shay dozing against his seat, still balanced in a crouch, her breathing deep and even. “Well that answers that. Thanks again for the pep-talk, Shiro. I’ll call you later.”

“Looking forward to it,” Shiro said. “Sleep well.”

* * *

Since arriving on the planet once called Daibazaal, Lance had come to appreciate the sheer devastation of a vkullor attack. It didn’t matter that the attack had happened more then ten thousand years ago. It still stained this world like a bloody wound that had never fully healed. It went beyond the ragged crater that cut the planet to the core, visible as jagged, oddly-angled mountains on the horizon. It went beyond the debris kicked up in the attack, which formed a hundred lights in the night sky too big to be stars but too small to be called moons. It went beyond the lifeless crystal visible amid the wreckage as they’d come in past the Galra blockade.

The planet was dead. A few hundred small pockets of civilization still existed, scattered across the surface of the world in self-contained domes like the 301. There was some communication among these dome-cities: radio and holo broadcasts to carry entertainment and (heavily edited) news briefs, public comms lines for those who had friends or families in other cities, and a sparse network of transits for those few with the time and money to travel.

The land in between was almost universally barren rock, aside from a few hardy species like the scrub of the desert around the Garrison, which huddled up against the semi-solid barriers that marked the edge of the habitable zones.

According to Thace and what little information he’d been able to dig up on Old Daibazaal, the vkullor’s attack had done more than shatter the planet. The beast hadn’t just hit the planet and run; it had latched on, actually dragging Daibazaal slightly out of orbit. Global temperatures had plunged, most of the planet’s free water freezing over. There were no surviving records that pinned down the length of an old Galran day or year, but Thace suspected both had lengthened significantly—all at once or over the course of the millennia, it was impossible to say.

The point was, a day here was something like thirty-six hours, the sun too dim to really count as daylight to Lance’s mind, the nights long and bitter cold, even with the climate regulation provided by the dome.

And Galra circadian rhythms weren’t all that much longer than human or Altean, either. There was some difference; they’d noticed that on the castle-ship already and had settled into a twenty-five hour day, which was a little too long for the Alteans and Shay and a little too short for the Galra.

For the most part, the 301 had adopted a kind of super-day—people rose with the sun, took a short nap in the afternoon, then went to bed at dusk. Halfway through the eighteen-ish-hour night (the planet’s orbit and axis were both somewhat unstable) there was a second, shorter period of wakefulness, usually four to six hours.

Lance had had a hard time adjusting to this schedule, more so even than Thace and Keith, who had displayed a remarkable ability to fall asleep at any time and wake up ready for action. Lance dragged through most days feeling like he’d pulled an all-nighter.

Now it was an hour or two into the second half of the night, what the Galra here called _dal’sapt_. (Keith said it translated, loosely, to ‘second sleep,’ in contrast to _pri’sapt_ , the first sleep.)

Whatever it was called, it was late, and Lance hadn’t slept well. Not uncommon, but at least they didn’t need to keep perfectly in time with the local day cycle. He’d survived the last six months mostly by working until he dropped and then sleeping for a good ten hours, heedless of arbitrary things like time.

The strangest part of being up and about at this dark hour was the fact that all three of them were wearing hooded cloaks and holographic masks (better than skin paint by miles and miles, but still annoyingly distracting for the omnipresent whine of the projector and the faint hazy glow that lingered in the corners of his vision.) Galra had better than decent low-light vision, thanks to some distant nocturnal ancestor, and the streets were far from empty even now.

And, oh yeah, Lance being one of the few non-Galra on planet was the least of their worries, considering Keith and Thace both had bounties on their heads. Lance did too, now, but that was as a nameless member of the unknown rebel faction that had been kicking up a fuss along the Southeastern Ridge these last few months. Keith was the Defector Prince and whatever Thace had done when he finally blew his cover had made him even more infamous.

Lance had never really wanted to turn his life into an episode of Zarkon’s Most Wanted, but, well, here he was.

Really, he should have known he was headed this direction from the day he first set foot on the Castle of Lions. Picking up a couple of hotheaded Galra rebels and hijacking Imperial newscasts was really just a footnote in the story of his criminal life.

Keith reached up to rub his ear, his nose scrunching up in discomfort. Whereas Lance’s mask was opaque (as it was easier to conceal his features rather than try to make a human look Galra), Keith and Thace wore a different sort of mask. It didn’t give them different faces, only smudged their features a little to thwart the Empire’s identification software and diminish the odds of being recognized on the street. It was necessary; even Keith agreed with that, but that didn’t stop him from complaining about the masks and ripping his off at the first opportunity.

 _It whines,_ he’d once said, gesturing vaguely and giving a frustrated huff. _I don’t like it._

Lance sidled up to him now, head tilted to study the way the neon lights of the city painted the curves of Keith’s face. It was odd, watching familiar expressions flit across the wrong face, but just now the furrow of his brow and the slight pursing of his lips was so utterly _Keith_ that he might not have been wearing a mask at all.

“So there we were again,” Lance said, pitching his voice low and gruff as he inched closer to Keith. “All alone on the city streets—alone except for the other sad souls stuck on this no-good heap of stone and broken dreams.”

Thace turned sharply, his luminous gaze as piercing as the too-bright signs around them. Lance ignored the man, choosing to focus instead on Keith, who was fighting down a grin. Lance still hadn’t found an example of film noir to show him, but Keith was starting to get the reference anyway. (Lance, after all, took every opportunity to narrate their adventures in the cold, dark, jaded streets of the Galra homeworld.)

“The chill in the air cut deeper than a luxite knife. The night was just how I like my coffee: black.”

Keith snorted, hunching his shoulders as though he could trap the sound. Thace turned again, eyes narrowing.

“Focus,” he chided. “Tonight’s going to be dangerous enough without distraction.”

Keith’s grin faded, and he picked up the pace, the rigid set coming back into his shoulders. Lance sighed, lagging behind the others for a few steps. Okay, so Thace wasn’t _wrong_. Everything they did here was dangerous. They’d seen signs of resistance among the locals, but whoever was behind the graffiti, the broken windows, the occasional acts of sabotage and the attacks on Imperial caches—they knew how to lie low. Thace thought he’d come close to making contact once, but for now they were still on their own.

And, yeah, okay, there would be trouble if they were caught tonight. Not anything the three of them couldn’t handle, but enough to be annoying, and enough that the populace might get caught up in the backlash. Balmera crystals were a precious commodity here, where synthetic Quintessence was the main power source. sQ couldn’t keep people alive, though—not without side-effects—so whoever controlled the crystal supply controlled the 301.

Tonight, for once, that someone wasn’t going to be the Empire.

So, yes, focus was important. _Focus_ , not nerves. And Keith was definitely nervous now.

Steeling himself against Thace’s scowl, Lance shoved his hands into the pockets of his armored gray bodysuit and stalked forward to take his place between his companions. “The old man was in a grump tonight. Big mission.” Lance lifted his hand and mimed taking a drag on a cigarette, then flicked imaginary ashes into the gutter. “What I wouldn’t give for a bottle o’ hooch.”

Keith’s gaze darted to Lance, then past him to Thace, who heaved a long-suffering sigh.

Lance abandoned his fake cigarette in favor of tugging his hood lower. It was no trench coat-and-fedora, but Lance was willing to allow a pass on alien fashion because of just how well the 301 fit the aura of film noir. (He'd have said ''cyberpunk," but tech here actually wasn't much more advanced than back on Earth.) Dark streets, occasional patches of stagnant fog, bright lights that only served to deepen the stark shadows... Capture it all on black and white film and it’d be an instant classic.

“I’m not a clever man. But if there’s one thing I know, it’s how to spot a storm on the horizon. And this was a storm as big as any I’d ever seen. I could hear the thunder in my own heartbeat as I walked that lonely road. That... boulevard of broken dreams.”

Keith’s eyes burned into the side of Lance’s head, his suspicion palpable in the cold night air. He couldn’t have gotten the reference, unless one of the other paladins was a secret Green Day fan. (Actually, scratch that. There was a very good chance Keith had heard that song in Matt’s head and was just trying to place the memory.)

It didn’t matter either way, because six months together had given Keith plenty of chances to pick up on Lance’s tells, which mean he almost always knew when Lance was pulling something.

He didn’t say anything, though, just watched Lance, his smile creeping back in.

“As we neared our destination, I had to ask myself how. How had I gotten wrapped up in a mess like this? There had been no dame with fine jewels and legs for days, no broad in a tattered coat begging for my aid. Just a poor bastard with a laugh like a thousand angels singing and my own goddamn bleeding heart.”

Keith’s composure broke, and he gave Lance’s arm a shove. “A thousand angels?” he asked with a snort.

“Well...” Lance tapped his chin. “Just Michael right now, if I'm being honest. I guess the rest of the choir is feeling bashful.” He grinned as Keith laughed for real, leaning into Lance until his weight threw off Lance's balance, making them both stumble. “Ah. There they come.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Keith said into Lance's shoulder.

Lance grinned brighter, meeting Thace’s eyes levelly. “I do try.”

Thace shook his head. “All right, you’ve had your fun. Now come on. We’re almost there.”

Was that Lance’s imagination, or did Thace’s lips actually quirk into a tiny little echo of a smile? That was practically a seal of approval coming from the original crusty P.I. himself. _Honestly_. Lance was going to have to dig a little deeper here after the job. He did what he could to uphold the spirit noir, but he just wasn’t grizzled enough to play the lead in this genre.

Thace on the other hand…

Oh, yeah. There was a treasure trove of potential there.

* * *

Shay slept for twelve twelve hours, and she woke to a change in Yellow’s song. Twice during the night she had stirred enough to recognize the lullaby of fond watchfulness. The lion remained on the ground in the midst of the ruined city, as the Shlanndans needed the reminder that they were not alone. Shay was not worried about an attack, either by Galra forces lingering in the area or by disgruntled Shlanndans. Yellow’s armor was thick enough to defend against any weapon, and she would rouse her paladins if anything required their attention.

It was not a warning that enticed Shay out of sleep now, however. This was something lighter, something almost playful. Shay sat up, blinking in the dampened light of midday streaming in through the Yellow Lion’s viewscreen, and reached out to her lion.

Yellow’s song hiccuped, turned hastily toward apology, and smoothed out as Shay added a soothing countermelody. After a moment, Yellow relayed a vision of what she saw on the street outside: children. One of them Shay recognized as the young child Hunk had tried to speak to before; others were older. There were even some adults fretting over the crowd, trying to call their children back. The children continued to play, heedless of the adults’ reprimands. They scrambled over rubble at the edges of the plaza, started up a game of tag in an open space that had avoided the destruction of the battle. Some few ventured nearer the Lion, with upward glances like they expected Yellow to attack.

Yellow was amused by the display, but she held perfectly still, afraid to startle the young ones. She followed them with only her eyes, occasionally rumbling a purr that made those nearest her head gape at her in wonder, then run off, shouting the news to their friends.

Shay chuckled to herself as the vision dissolved. She stood, stretched, and glanced to where Hunk lay, sprawled across the cot he had used as a bed for most of the last six months. Visits to the castle had gotten rarer and shorter as time went on, and they had made improvements to the cockpit in the name of comfort—switching out the original compact bunks for something a little softer, installing a stove and pantry. Hunk wanted a larger kitchen, but he had opted first to expand the basic facilities in the larger bay down below to include a shower.

They had adapted, as Shay was well accustomed to. Yellow was more generous a shelter than what Shay had known as a youngling—and in many ways, she was more a home than the castle-ship with its silent walls and lifeless core. At least here she had the song to bear her to sleep.

The fatigue was not entirely diminished by the night’s rest, though Shay did feel more herself than she had in days. Still she stood, swaying on her feet and watching Hunk sleep, for some time before she remembered herself and went below to refresh herself. Showers were unheard of on her Balmera, and bathing in general was a rare luxury, but Shay indulged today, if only to clear away the sense that the violence of the previous days still clung to her skin like a film.

By the time she returned to the cockpit, Hunk had begun to stir, though he was not yet precisely conscious. He grunted when Shay called his name and shied away from her finger when it prodded his side.

“I am going out soon,” Shay said. “I thought you might want to know.”

One eye appeared over the hem of his pillowcase. “Out?”

“We have some… admirers,” she said, smiling as Yellow offered Hunk a glimpse outside. His gaze went glassy, and he cocked his head to the side.

“Huh.”

Shay straightened, rolling her shoulder, which she had strained in the fighting, trying to hold Yellow steady as she took heavy fire. Hunk lingered in the bond a moment longer, then shook himself and stood. He said nothing, but she felt his resignation. There was still work to be done, and they did not yet have the luxury of a day off.

Shay headed outside while Hunk went to shower, and the Shlanndan children scattered, chittering in a high chorus. Yellow’s amusement grew, and she passed to Shay the image of other children in another time sneaking into the Lion’s hangar on a dare from their friends. They, too, had been spooked by the smallest of movements.

A sudden image, crystalline in its clarity, stood out beyond the rest. A young Galra, with large ears and periwinkle stripes in her thick fur, stood firm when the others scattered. It wasn’t quite courage that held her there, but rather awe. She was unafraid of the Yellow Lion, unbothered by her companions’ calls to hide.

 _Too young,_ Yellow thought. But she would keep an eye on this one.

The girl’s name came to Shay like a distant memory suddenly snapping into focus. Rukka, the last Yellow Paladin. Shay had spoken to the woman’s AI several times, but the AI appeared as Rukka had been when she died—older, the periwinkle in her fur turned to gray, her broad shoulders beginning to stoop with age.

Yellow rumbled, amusement fading to sorrow and a pang of nostalgia.

Shay laid a hand on her nose, singing comfort, then broke away, dropping into a crouch just beyond Yellow’s shadow. Most of the Shlanndan children had stopped at the edge of the plaza, watching Shay as intently as they did Yellow.

For a moment, Shay floundered. She had never been a caretaker at home; that had been Rax’s passion, and she had been content to leave him to it. Shay was one for exploration, for stories. She had trained under her grandmother to heal and, after the paladins’ first visit, she had chased what few stories remained of the sky and the ancients’ talent for navigation.

Children were an enigma to her.

“All is well,” she said, her voice halting. She had already discovered that these people could not hear the song, and their expressions were of limbs and antennae more than of the face. Their fear was plain from the way they hid behind parents and rubble, but she feared she was in no position to convey that she was no threat to them.

Her eyes caught on a thin, wilted shoot between the stones of the plaza. It was more weed than flower, but it was life in a city that had seen much death these past days. Humming to herself, Shay reached out and cupped her hand around the weed, focusing her Quintessence into its cells. It resisted her song for a moment, drowning in its slow decay, but then it stilled.

It straightened by fractions, withered leaves unfurling, a few tiny purple flowers opening on the tips of the branching stem.

When it was healthy once more, Shay pulled her hand back, smiling at her work—one little bit of recovery in a sea of despair. It was a small gesture, but it made her feel a little bit better. And when she looked up to see that two of the Shlanndan children had ventured nearer, eyes glittering in the sunlight.

“How did you do that?” one of them asked, their voice a dry rasp. “Are you magic?”

“By a certain definition, I suppose I am,” Shay said, offering a smile. “Though where I come from, such things are commonplace. Do you know what Quintessence is?”

The first child shook their head, but the other, who appeared some years older, blinked twice and looked up at Shay. “That’s what the Galra wanted, isn’t it? It’s like… food?”

“Almost,” Shay said. “You need it to live, but you don’t eat it.” She pressed her palm against the ground, drawing some of the planet’s Quintessence to the surface. The children gasped. Shlannda was a Quintessence-rich planet, and once it had been covered in lush plant life and creatures unlike anything seen elsewhere in the universe.

Zarkon’s occupation had ruined much of the planet’s biodiversity as a team of druids extracted a portion of the planet’s life force to fuel their experiments in synthesizing Quintessence. They had already killed off too many Balmera, Shay supposed, so they had to turn to other sources--as they had done in CORE and in Project Balmera. Fortunately, they had never taken so much from Shlannda that people died. They suffered, and the extraction had left some populations more vulnerable to diseases that _had_ killed them. But no one could be proved to have died from Quintessential deprivation.

Yellow leaned forward, resting her chin atop Shay—much to the awe and terror of the children, who each took a single step back. They didn’t flee this time, though, and Shay smiled.

“This is Yellow. Fear not. She will not harm you.”

The older child inched forward, reaching one hand up toward Yellow’s snout. They hesitated a few inches away, drawing back, and Yellow rumbled exasperation.

 _Patience,_ Shay thought. _They are frightened._

Yellow obediently remained still, and when the child finally surged forward to pet her, the growl turned at once to a contented purr. Shay smiled into her hand.

“She is happy to meet you. What is your name?”

“Klenni,” the child said. “And that’s Jethn.”

“Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Klenni. Jethn.” Shay’s tongue tripped over the pronunciations, which were so different from the simple, open sounds of her native language. The universal translator helped with a great deal, but names were left alone, and the Shlanndan people’s names seemed to cluster behind her teeth, a sound that bordered on a hum.

Yellow shifted again, setting her chin against the ground nearby and opening her mouth to let Hunk out. His hair hung damp around his face, his armor still scuffed and scorched from the battle yesterday. Shay had remained in the air through nearly the entire fight, but Hunk had left the lion near the end to clear out pockets of Galra sheltering inside buildings and to pull Shlanndans free from the rubble of their collapsed homes.

The circles beneath his eyes stood out even more today than they had before, but his was a genuine smile when he spotted Klenni and Jethn.

“Um.”

Shay turned at the new voice and found another Shlanndan child standing there, shuffling their four feet. A parent hovered nearby, antennae drooping with exhaustion.

“You are… paladins?” the adult asked.

Hunk nodded. “Yeah. Two of them, anyway.”

The Shlanndan nodded and pushed their child forward. The child stumbled to a stop, then held out their hand. Two small, rounded glass vials dangled by lengths of string from their twiggy fingers, contents glittering blue and violet in the sunlight. Shay took one of the vials, curious, as Hunk took the other. Whatever was inside had a sand-like consistency, sliding around the container as she turned it this way and that.

“ _Onndanai_ ,” the child said, voice a murmur that made Shay wonder whether she’d misheard. “’t keep you safe.”

“They’re talismans, of a sort,” the parent said. “I know… I know you probably have access to much more than this, but we wanted to give you something. My hatchmate is an engineer, and the Galra were threatening to take them away. If you hadn’t come when you did--” They stopped, shaking their head. “Thank you.”

Shay’s heart ached, emotion closing her throat for a moment so all she could do was clasp the vial close to her chest. She sensed faint Quintessence within—the remnants of depleted Balmera crystals, most likely. On a planet slowly being drained of its life, such talismans would be very valuable. Perhaps alone they would do little, but their effect would be additive, and for some of these people, any scrap of Quintessence might make all the difference.

“You don’t have to thank us,” Hunk said, sniffling a little as he closed his hand around the talisman. “Helping people is what we do. Your hatchmate—are they--?”

“Working with your companions, the ones with the midnight ships. There is much to be rebuilt.”

The midnight ships. A poetic moniker for the Guard fighters, and not the first time Shay had heard it. Word of the Guard’s efforts was beginning to spread, mutating as it did so. On the last world they had liberated, there had been stories of ships appearing from thin air to punish Galra who attacked the innocent.

True, the Guard fighters’ dark color scheme lent itself to surprise attacks, especially in space or at night. But Shay had heard tell of arcane portals opening in the midst of enemy formations, spewing vengeful gods that cut down the Galra forces.

She wondered if Akira had heard these stories.

Hunk blinked furiously, then tucked the talisman away inside his armor. “Tell them we wish them well—wish all of you well,” Hunk said. He paused, then crouched down and placed a hand on the child’s head. “Thank you for the—what did you call them? _Onndanai_?”

The child nodded, beaming, and Hunk’s eyes crinkled.

“Well, then. Thank you for this _onndanai_. It’s beautiful.”

The child’s antennae fluttered, and they turned to bury their face in their parent’s skirt-like smock.

Hunk chuckled, then stood. “I mean it. Thank you. But we should get going now; there’s still a lot of work to do.”

They nodded, bobbing their head a few times as they drew their child back toward the edge of the plaza. Hunk turned to Shay, eyes shining, and she hummed a chaotic blend of emotions as they set off back toward the heart of the city.

“Remind me to tell Shiro he was right,” Hunk said, rubbing the back of his hand against his nose. “I can put up with politicians for the sake of people like that.”

Shay smiled, her hand brushing against his elbow. “As can I,” she said, already making plans to return to the streets after the conclusion of the day's business.

* * *

The ship full of Balmera crystals was set to arrive at the Quintessence Distribution Center two hours before dawn. The QDC compound took up an entire city block, the loading bays concentrated in the center of a ring of warehouses and processing centers, the entirety of which was ringed by a ten-foot wall, giving the entire place the feel of an enormous bullseye.

The Imperials had made the questionable decision to let automatic security run the show, trusting to the 301’s restrictions of civilian air travel and the populace’s rightful wariness of armed guards to keep things quiet. Anyone trying to enter the compound without the proper clearance would be shot on sight.

Unfortunately for Zarkon, Thace had made a career of hacking imperial tech, and he’d amassed a store of clean credentials to use on jobs like this one. Lance wasn’t sure who the system saw them as tonight, but it was enough to get them through the gate and onto the asphalt without alerting security. Keith and Thace found a place on the ground to hide, while Lance headed upstairs and found an empty room with a window overlooking the loading bay. Lance brought the butt of his rifle down on the window, shattering the clear polymer with a single, soft  _crack_ and letting in a chill breeze.

Jobs like this required subtlety; Thace had hammered that lesson into both of them from the start. Subtlety, in this case (and in fact in most cases), meant anonymity, which meant Lance didn’t have his paladin armor or his bayard, but the rifle they’d lifted from an Imperial arms locker two months ago was a beauty, and he’d finally found a pair of rocket boots that worked well enough to not kill him.

Sorry, elor boots. (They worked the same, anyway.)

“I’ve got eyes on a transport,” Lance said, watching through the scope of his rifle as the ship hovered in place over the loading bays. He adjusted the angle until he found the ship’s designation. “Positive ID.”

“Good,” Thace said. “Everyone hold. Rain, keep an eye on the dock workers. Fire on my mark.”

“Copy that.” Lance shifted, setting his sights on the crew on the ground. They’d run through the plan three times before leaving the apartment. It was simple, in theory. They couldn’t give away their presence too early, or the transport would notice and take off to protect the shipment of crystals. Wait too long, and there would be a dozen dock workers out in the open.

They’d agreed from the start that they were going to keep their hits as non-lethal as possible. Most people on this planet were just trying to make a living, and Lance really didn’t want to kill them. The real enemy was safe inside the government enclosure, running almost everything remotely, and they’d have no qualms about turning something like this around and using it to sour public opinion of the nameless malcontents shaking things up.

Lance breathed deeply, lining up his shot on the magnetic catch that held the hangar door open on the dock that was to receive the shipment. It was a difficult shot, but Thace had already cased the QDC to give Lance the best angle. Most of the staff stayed inside the hangar during landing—all except one who was out helping the ship line itself up. If Lance timed it right, that QDC worker and the crew of the transport were the only people they’d have to deal with.

“Now,” Thace hissed.

Lance took the shot.

The catch shattered, and Lance quickly realigned, shooting out the second catch on the other side. The door crashed down, sealing the rest of the dock workers inside. Someone banged on the slatted metal door, the hollow noise ringing out across the landing pad. Lance lifted his rifle away from the windowsill, slinging the strap over his shoulder as an alarm began to blare. Down below, Thace and Keith were already in motion—Thace headed for the dock worker, Keith, vaulting onto the partially-lowered ramp of the ship.

Small vessels like this one typically only had a crew of two, but as Lance swung himself out through the window, firing his elors to slow his descent, he couldn’t help the way his heart hammered in his throat. The ramp snapped shut behind Keith. The ship wavered, landing struts stirring like the pilot was trying to get them off the ground.

Then it set down again, and the ramp lowered to let Thace on board. Lance breathed a sigh of relief. His feet hit pavement, and he took off running, reaching the ramp just as Thace dragged the unconscious copilot down the ramp and dumped him beside the pilot and the dock worker.

Keith took them up as soon as Thace called the all clear, keeping it steady though his adrenaline must have been through the roof.

Subtlety. That meant no racing off and drawing the eye of every aircraft controller in the 301. Thace slid into the copilot’s seat and brought up the flight information, quickly sorting through it and reading out a heading to Keith. Lance hovered behind, a hand on each of the seats, and scanned for signs of pursuit.

It was always amazing how quickly Thace’s jobs went. They were short, focused hits that wasted nothing, and this was no exception. Within two minutes, they’d set down in an abandoned shipyard near the southern end of the city. Two minutes after that, they’d transferred the crystals to a much smaller speeder Thace had procured for them.

Then they were gone, leaving no tracks for the Imperial Police to follow.

Lance slumped as they put the shipyard behind them. “Smooth flying, Samurai,” he said, knocking a fist against Keith’s shoulder.

Keith grinned. The wind had tossed back his hood, and his hair whipped around his face as he looked toward Lance. “Nice shooting. I knew there was a reason we call you Sharpshooter.”

“We call him Rain,” Thace said, stone-faced as always. “Take the next right.”

Keith tipped his head back, groaning. “I _know_ where we’re going. And the job’s done. We don’t have to go by code names anymore.”

Thace paused, the pinch of his brow indistinct through his holomask. “We’re not done yet, _Fang._ ”

Lance stifled a laugh, even as Keith turned to shoot Thace a glare. He’d often wondered, since they’d chosen their code names, whether the translator considered that a name or not. The Galran word for _fang_ might sound downright badass for all Lance knew, and it certainly wouldn’t bring to mind vampires and those books about bird people. On the other hand, Fang itself might be a perfectly badass name to a Galran ear.

Didn’t make it any easier for Lance to call Keith “Fang” while keeping a straight face.

Thace—“Cipher,” technically, since he was still harping on the code names—ignored Keith’s irritated growls and continued to direct him through the city to the first of several contacts they’d picked out for distributing the crystals. It was dangerous to offload too many in one place. It would draw the wrong sort of attention from the Imperials, for one, and a large stock upped the odds that a desperate someone would get an idea for a quick score.

So they were splitting the haul up. The biggest chunk was going to Akko, a dealer they’d worked with before, who specialized in slipping extra supplies onto shipments to hospitals and med clinics across the 301. Most of the rest would end up back in infrastructure, one way or another—shoring up the Q-grid in the poorest neighborhoods, helping out the handful of food production plants still in operation. The Empire was slowly starving the 301, putting less and less into the places that made the nutrient paste these people lived off of. As the quality suffered, so did the health of the populace.

These crystals wouldn’t fix everything, but they would alleviate the worst of it, and without giving the Empire the kickback it expected from selling off crystals to the highest bidder.

They’d made two stops out of a planned four when Lance spotted a crowd gathering down a side street. He opened his mouth to comment on it, but Keith had already hit the brakes. They sat in the middle of the street, Keith’s grip on the controls tightening, for several long seconds.

“Fang,” Thace said. He packed a surprising amount of sympathy into that one word, but it was very clearly a _no_ , and Keith’s lips pulled back in a snarl.

“We _have_ to help them.”

“How?” Thace demanded. “You can’t be everywhere.”

“But we’re here _now_.” Keith flung a hand back toward the street they’d passed, ears laying flat as another speeder swerved around them, the driver shouting obscenities. “You know the IP’s never going to let a demonstration that size happen without some pushback.”

Thace shook his head. “We’re in the middle of a job.”

“We have to drop a crate at two more buildings, big _vrekking_ deal.” Keith growled, then unclasped his harness and levered himself over the side of the speeder. “I’m going. I’ll see you back at the apartment.”

Lance glanced between Keith and Thace, already fumbling with his own restraints and scrambling after Keith. Thace grabbed his wrist as he made to jump out. Lance stilled, glancing back.

“Don’t let him get in over his head,” Thace said. “Things are getting tense out there.”

Lance flashed a smile as he pulled out of Thace’s grip. “Don’t worry. We’ll just put in an appearance, then bow out. No sweat.”

Thace didn’t look convinced, but he made no further arguments as Lance dropped to the ground and hurried to join Keith.

* * *

The day passed slowly—more slowly than the last two, because at least those had been taken up with life-or-death battles. Today, Hunk was dragging by midafternoon, despite having slept until noon.

At least they didn’t have to do too much more with the ministers. Just a quick meeting when the delegation from Olkarion arrived to get things in motion, during which Hunk mostly stuck to the sidelines, watching and listening like he would if he were doing reconnaissance. Learn their language, Shiro had said. Well, Hunk would try. It pissed him off, hearing all the little snipes and backhanded compliments Tchell dished out. But he did listen.

It was over quick enough, and Hunk and Shay spent most of the afternoon helping the Guardsmen with reconstruction efforts. Yellow was more than eager to lend her strength where it was needed. If anything, she was _more_ engaged with this than with the battles that preceded it—though Hunk couldn’t really blame her for that. Fighting was nothing to get excited about.

Shiro had been away from his Lion when Hunk called in the morning, but he eventually called back, and Hunk took a break to talk politics and diplomacy. Shiro's advice was general, interspersed with stories of his own missteps, like the time he'd tried to skip the pleasantries and gravely offended a delegation from Nornora. The best way to learn, Shiro said, was by doing. He wanted Hunk to attend the upcoming summit--assuming nothing came up between now and then. Hunk wasn't quite sure how to respond to that; his experience so far on Shlannda told him it would be five days of pure torture. And Shiro's stories didn't exactly paint a happier picture.

Still, it was nice to know that Shiro really was as fed-up with it all as Hunk.

Shay joined them as the light faded, settling in on the arm of Hunk’s chair and easing them from rants about the political elite into stories about the Shlanndans they’d met during their work today. Shiro’s smile loosened as they talked, and he seemed energized by the time he signed off, which was more than Hunk had managed in his current state. Shay dismissed this thought before Hunk could even voice it.

“You are fine,” she said firmly, reaching for the comms controls. “If it is all right with you, it is weeks now since I spoke with my family.”

“Oh! Yeah, sure!” Hunk stood up so she could have the chair, but he lingered nearby as she pinged the castle for the Balmera’s current location. It was still roaming, rediscovering old migratory paths, which made it almost impossible to find without assistance--and aside from the emergency beacon, it was still running on an older, stationary comms system that meant Shay had to recalibrate each time she called.

That was good in the sense that it made it harder for Zarkon to find them. Not so good in how hard it was for Shay to call home. The spy on the castle-ship (and they _were_ certain by now that it was a person, as repeated physical and digital sweeps had come up clean) had been quiet lately, but no one wanted to risk them tracking down Shay’s Balmera, which meant they had to limit how often she called.

It took only a moment for the call to connect, and Shay’s grandmother beamed as the feed cleared. “Shay! It has been too long.”

“It has. Forgive me for not calling sooner.”

Mir waved her hand. “Think nothing of it, child. And Hunk! I trust you are well.”

“Oh, uh, yeah.” Hunk scratched his head, glancing down at Shay. “You want me to give you space? I don’t mind.”

“It’s—It’s fine.” Shay tried for a smile, but hurt laced her words, and Hunk’s heart constricted. He looked from her to the screen. Mir had pulled back from the camera, giving them a better view of who was there—and who _wasn’t_.

“What, _still?_ ” Hunk muttered, glaring at the empty space beside Shay’s parents where Rax should have been.

Shay’s shoulders drew up. “ _Pax_ ,” she whispered. “It is well. He has other duties to attend to.”

That was BS and Shay knew it—clearly she did, or she wouldn’t have spoken too softly for her family to overhear. The ugly truth was Rax still hadn’t forgiven Shay for “abandoning her people.” And he _definitely_ hadn’t forgiven the paladins for taking her away to war. He didn’t want to hear about how it had been Shay’s decision, how she was making a difference in the universe. All he cared about was that she hadn’t let him bully her into staying home.

And it pissed Hunk off.

“It is _fine_ ,” Shay hissed again, blinking back tears. “It matters not.”

Her voice had slipped into the tone it had when she was trying not to let the song bleed through, all clipped and forcibly monotone. Hunk cringed, but dropped the issue. He’d have some words for Rax next time he saw the guy, though, that was for damn sure.

If Shay’s family noticed the slip, they chose not to comment on it, launching instead into a cheerful narrative of all that had happened since Shay's last call. They’d begun to re-purpose the abandoned Galra tech for their own defensive network, albeit reluctantly. Many of the Balmerans were reluctant to use what had been turned against them not so long ago.

That was easier to think about than Rax, however, so Hunk let himself get caught up in technical suggestions and batting around ideas for how to make the tech their own, and eventually Shay came out of her gloom, even managing a few tired smiles before the conversation was over.

* * *

The demonstration was uneventful, for all Thace’s paranoia. Keith and Lance joined the crowd, Keith switching his mask over to its secondary setting, the opaque white mask like Lance’s, featureless except for eye holes—Keith’s open, Lance’s covered over with a yellow film—and an old Galran sigil in the center of the forehead than read _neza._ _Freedom._

It was dramatic, so Thace of course hated it. Hated that it was Lance’s best option, but especially hated when Keith put it on.

He didn’t understand that the three of them were becoming a symbol in the city. The IP knew them, knew what they were capable of. More importantly, they knew that the _Nezai_ , as they were called, were protectors of the populace and they did not take well to the police getting violent.

The crowd had gathered outside a food production plant--one of a handful left running in the 301. Listening to the conversation around him, Keith gathered that a quarter of the staff here had just been fired, and the neighborhood was understandably outraged. Unlike most of the recent demonstrations, this one had not been planned, and the IP had been slow to respond, gathering in clusters rather than the usual clean lines.

As soon as things started getting tense, Keith found a little bit of high ground and pushed back his hood. It was only a few moments before the first IP agent caught sight of him, and then the whispers spread. Batons that had been raised to strike demonstrators faltered, then disappeared as Lance joined Keith, subtly adjusting his rifle.

It was all about posturing, and the IP wasn’t desperate enough yet to provoke a full-on fight, just as they weren't yet desperate enough to start a wholesale slaughter. The fragile peace couldn't last forever, though, and Keith only hoped they were ready for what was to come.

But for today, the tensions never escalated past a few glares and some shuffling in the IP line. The crowd eventually dispersed, quiet and sullen but far from resigned, and Keith spared the IP one final glare before he let Lance drag him away.

The walk back to the apartment passed in silence, tension pulling at Keith’s spine. This city was on edge. The whole planet was. He’d seen signs of the rebellion Keena said was coming, but it hadn’t boiled over. Not yet. He couldn’t decide whether he was more impatient or relieved to not have to deal with it yet.

Thace was waiting for them when they finally made it home. Keith tensed, ready for a lecture about safety and subtlety, but it didn’t come. Instead, Thace just held out a piece of paper.

“This was sitting on the table when I got home.”

Keith’s pulse doubled, and he stared at the page in Thace’s hands until Lance took it. On the table… Someone had been in the apartment?

“Vrekt,” Keith muttered. "How did they find us? _Who_ found us?"

"I don't know," Thace said. "But I mean to find out."

Lance deactivated his mask, eyes flickering across the page. “Huh.”

“What?” Keith demanded. Instead of answering, Lance simply held out the page, which bore a single line of neatly typed print. Keith took it and read, his heart in his throat.

_We’ve seen what you can do, Nezai, and we wish to talk. Sorbak's Landing, tomorrow, start of dal’sapt.  
_


	17. Vindication

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Matt, Val, Allura, and Edi left the castle in search of a Pygnarat master who could teach them the ancient arts of shaping Quintessence. Matt and Val hope it will give them a new, more effective way to manage their crystal infection in the long term. They have been training with their master, Fligg, for six months.
> 
> Meanwhile, Nyma has been handling distress calls on her own, or occasionally with Shiro and the Guard, and Karen continues to study and train on New Altea, seeking new ways to support the paladins of Voltron.

Allura leaped back as a column of flame erupted at her feet. The ledge she stood on was uneven, patches of thin grass interspersed with stone made slick by the spray coming off the waterfall. Allura’s left foot came down on a loose rock, and it crumbled away, falling away into the mist. Allura shuffled toward surer footing, shivering at the reminder of just how precarious an arena this was. She was beginning to regret not changing into her paladin armor for this match, as her white tanktop and loose gray pants couldn't even protect her from the chill.

Quintessence once more swirled in the air around her, burning hot in comparison to the mist and the mountain wind. Allura stood her ground this time, holding one hand out before her, palm down toward the ledge underfoot, which glowed crimson as Matt focused his Quintessence.

Allura breathed in, and on the exhale, she arrested the currents of Matt’s Quintessence. The heat vanished in an instant, the red glow fading until nothing remained but a faint scorch mark.

“No fair!” Matt called, creeping forward along the ledge. He’d kept his distance for most of this fight—at least since they’d abandoned the relatively safe footing of Master Fligg’s training ground in the valley above. He knew, as Allura did, that she had the upper hand in close quarters—especially on terrain where a single push could send an opponent toppling.

Allura grinned, reaching out with her Quintessence in search of other ledges. She was nearing the end of this one, and she didn’t want to let him corner her. Fligg had taught her to sense her environment through the flows of Quintessence, and while her perception was still fuzzy at best, this valley was rich enough in Quintessence to light the land up like a bonfire.

Matt’s eyes darted past Allura, and his lips quirked into a smile as he spotted the ledge she’d been eyeing. Allura cursed under her breath. Matt couldn’t identify the source or intent of Quintessence as well as Allura could, but he saw Allura's Quintessence as a blue mist, and that told him where her focus lay.

“Running away, Princess?” Matt teased, shifting his footing for better balance and concentrating his Quintessence between his palms. His left eye shone with blue light behind the lenses of his goggles—dimly enough that Allura wouldn’t have noticed had she not known to look, but eerie just the same. “Come on, where’s the fun in that?”

Allura read his magic in an instant: a compact spiral, hardly a ripple in the air but intense enough that her hair stood on end from ten feet away. She’d seen him do this before, binding his energy inside a thin shell. When it hit another source of Quintessence, it ruptured, creating a small explosion.

In this valley, almost anything would set it off.

Allura shuffled back, letting Matt think she was keeping her distance. When he shifted and flung his spell at the rocky ledge above and behind Allura, though, she charged. Matt’s Quintessence was sluggish, and it took time to redirect its flows. With one spell airborne, she had a narrow window.

She intended to take advantage of it.

Matt’s eyes widened as Allura sprinted for him, hands up and ready to strike. They’d agreed on no weapons for this match, just Quintessence and wits. For Matt, that meant keeping his distance, but for Allura--

Matt’s Quintessence grenade detonated behind them, nearly bowling Allura over, but she absorbed the momentum, let it push her forward.

“ _Vrekt_ ,” Matt hissed, arm snapping up in a block that forced Allura’s strike aside. Her open palm hit the stone of the cliffside, shattering it, and the fragments bit into Allura’s cheek as she pressed forward. Matt wasn’t fast enough to deflect her second blow. The heel of her hand connected with his shoulder, and Allura lashed out with her Quintessence, shaping it into a thousand tiny needles that sank into Matt’s skin. Her awareness once more followed her Quintessence, sinking into Matt, spreading through his body. In an instant, his Quintessence became her own, an extension of herself, pliant before her will. She could not control his body or mind (she had tried once, fearful of her own potential, and had been relieved to find a wide gulf between what she could touch and Matt's own will.) Nevertheless, it was a simple thing to halt his magic in its tracks.

The flame he’d ignited in his right hand spluttered out, and the breath hissed through his teeth as he retreated and slapped Allura’s hand aside. The instant she lost contact with his shoulder, she lost her grip on his Quintessence.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I run away?” Allura teased, stepping once more inside Matt’s guard. She’d spent weeks studying her own Quintessence flows, as well as those of her companions, to determine where to push and how to make someone else’s Quintessence reflect her own. Fligg said the old masters had possessed the power to permanently block Quintessence from a part of their opponent’s body, or to drain the life right out of them.

Allura didn’t have that sort of strength yet, and in truth she was grateful for that. The power to kill with a touch wasn’t something to be envied.

But what she could do was sufficient to throw Matt off balance, and he scrambled back, feet slipping on the edge of the abyss as he retreated toward the shadow of the waterfall. The cascade plunged some five feet out from the wall here, sparing them the bruising force of the torrent, though the slick rocks were treacherous enough on their own. Here Matt had the advantage with his Olkari goggles pulled down over his eyes. Allura squinted against the icy spray, so focused on keeping her footing that she didn’t notice Matt gathering his Quintessence until another pillar of flame blossomed between them.

Allura recoiled, slipped, and barely caught herself before plunging into open air. She landed on one knee, fingers clutching at the stone, her other foot dangling in open air.

Beyond the waterfall’s spray, Matt sprinted for surer footing, then began to scale the cliff, back toward the high ground. Gritting her teeth, Allura hauled herself back up on to the ledge and gave chase. Matt glanced down at her, swore, and dropped a miniature Quintessence bomb as he reached another outcropping and leaped for the next handhold.

The grenade hit, shattering the outcropping, and Allura slammed both palms against the cliff face in front of her. She plunged into the Quintessence of the mountain, which was so old and placid that time itself seemed to slow. It was ever-changing, this mountain, and in a day or two it would hardly miss the chunk of rock Matt had just blasted to dust, but for now, it balanced on an edge. The shape it had held a moment ago resonated in its Quintessence, unfolding before Allura with hardly any prompting.

The air around her ignited blue, veins of pure Quintessence like lightning branching out between the chips of stone and clods of dirt. The waterfall still fell, roaring far below as it hit the distant riverbed, but here all was still, the broken outcropping suspended in place. Allura _pushed_ , and the threads of Quintessence knit the cliff side back together, undoing the damage. The cracks between fragments of stone glowed blue for a moment, and then even that light faded, the cracks sealing shut as Allura grabbed hold of the ledge. By the time she stood atop the outcropping there was no sign it had ever been anything but whole.

Above, Matt glanced over his shoulder, eyes widening as he caught sight of Allura, and he scrambled the rest of the way up in a mad dash. Allura followed more sedately, her Quintessence pooling around her now, wide awake and feeling out the cliff. It alerted her to the sturdiest handholds, strengthened her arms as she hauled herself up, and warned her of Matt’s position just out of sight beyond the cliff’s edge, waiting to ambush her.

Let him try.

Allura quested outward, directing her Quintessence to the side so Matt would see it pooling some thirty feet away from where she would come up, on the other side of his hiding place.

She crested the cliff silently. Matt had taken her bait and crouched with his back to her, Quintessence eddying between his hands. Allura smiled, creeping forward, and reached out for the back of his neck. A hand on his throat and her hooks in his Quintessence would render him helpless, ending the match—and this match had dragged on long enough already.

When Allura was a step away, Matt tensed, a curse springing to his lips as he spun. Allura struck, but Matt shifted, and her blow missed its mark. Her Quintessence lashed out, sinking through skin and flesh, but not into the usual channels. Matt cried out and crumpled. The Quintessence in his hands scattered, snapping sparks at Allura’s bare arms as it passed.

Allura fell out of stance at once, her heart hammering in her throat. “Matt? Oh, quiznak.”

He remained where he was, curled in on himself, his arms up and wrapped around his head. “I’m fine,” he gasped. “Sorry—Give me a sec.”

Allura hesitated, her Quintessence too loud and loose for her ease. It itched to move, to shape, and that made her restless, too. After only a moment, she inched forward. “Are you injured?”

“Headache,” Matt grunted. “Not your fault.”

Allura’s heart dropped. Of course. Despite all their training, despite Fligg dedicating hours to helping Matt adjust to the new sensory input, powerful flashes of Quintessence still gave Matt intense migraines. The Olkari lenses helped, and he could modulate his own Quintessence so it didn’t bother him so much, but Allura’s strike had passed very near his eyes, perhaps hit them directly.

And of course what little healing she’d learned depended on increasing the flow of Quintessence to the site of the injury, which in this case was counterproductive.

Instead, Allura settled into a crouch, quieting the valley’s Quintessence until it retreated into the ground. She reached out to lay a hand on Matt’s shoulder, and he turned his head enough to offer her a weak smile.

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s already starting to—ahh.” Matt squeezed his eyes shut, wincing. “Okay, maybe it’s not finished with me yet.”

“Perhaps you should lie down,” Allura said. “Sleep it off.”

Matt was silent for a moment, then slowly began to straighten. “That’s… yeah. I think I’ll do that.”

He staggered, and Allura darted forward to steady him. “Easy,” Allura said. “Let me help you.”

Matt blinked, squinting, then sagged against Allura. “All right. Sorry to be such a bother.”

“It’s not your fault. I’m happy to help.” Allura squeezed Matt’s shoulders, guiding him back to the small, round building Fligg had constructed for them from the stone at the valley’s edge. After learning about Matt’s condition, they’d warded it against the Quintessence that filled the valley, making it Matt's only respite when things grew overwhelming.

Matt collapsed onto his cot almost as soon as they crossed the threshold, pulling the blanket over his head and breathing out a sigh.

“Get some rest,” Allura said. “I’ll bring you some water.”

Matt grunted, and he managed a sincere—if slightly frustrated—thank you when Allura returned with a clay cup and a pitcher full of water.

She left him there, tamping down on her own guilt at having put such an abrupt end to their training for the day. Matt had been doing so much better lately—regaining the weight he’d lost during his captivity, moving more easily than he had in a long while. He still used his compression sleeve and knee brace to counter the aches and weakness wrought by the crystals growing rampant inside his body, but he was less stiff than he'd once been.

Allura supposed that even magic could not erase all marks of what had been done to him.

The plan had been to follow up their spar with some exercises in fine control and then some meditation before they broke for dinner, but without her training partner Allura found herself wandering to the north end of the valley, where Fligg had taken Val and Edi early that morning.

As she approached, Allura spotted Fligg and Edi at once, seated side by side, legs crossed, facing the stream that bisected the valley. Fligg was utterly relaxed, their arms resting loosely on their legs. Edi, in contrast, seemed to be holding her posture though force of will; her shoulders were tense, her face scrunched up in concentration.

 _You finished early,_ Fligg observed, their voice sliding as always directly into Allura’s mind. Beside them, Edi gave a start, ear swiveling toward Fligg and then toward Allura before she cracked an eye open. Finding Allura there, she yelped and resumed her meditative posture, though her quivering ears gave away the game.

“Matt got a migraine,” Allura said simply. “He’s resting, and I... Well, I suppose I'm too tense to move onto the advanced exercises just yet.”

_You wish to meditate with us? Clear your mind, perhaps?_

It wasn’t a bad idea, and Allura likely would have come here anyway if she’d know that’s what they were doing. She hesitated, though, glancing around the stone platform they used for meditation. It stood high on the valley’s slope, far enough from the training ground that any sound faded into the background.

There also wasn’t exactly anywhere to hide.

“Where’s Val?”

Fligg lifted a hand and pointed upstream. Allura followed the gesture and found Val kneeling on the shores of the spring that pooled around the mouth of a small cave. She sat close enough to the water that her clothes—the same loose pants and sleeveless shirt Allura wore, though Val also had a poncho wrapped around her shoulders—must have been trailing in the water.

“That’s right,” Allura whispered. “That was today. How’s it going?”

_Difficult to say. She has not given up yet._

Which might mean Val’s experiment had worked, or it might mean she was too stubborn to admit defeat. Either way, it was best not to disturb her. Allura took a seat next to Fligg, but she didn’t settle into the meditative posture they’d taught her just yet.

“We’ve learned a lot since we came here,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “I cannot thank you enough for your guidance.”

 _It is what I have waited for my entire life,_ Fligg said. _I saw great danger, and I knew you would need me._ They paused, gill-like slits on the sides of their head fanning silently. _You wish to leave._

“I wished to talk to you about that, yes. We aren’t masters, I know, but our primary goal in coming here was to give Matt and Val a way to combat the crystals growing inside them. They have that skill now.” Allura looked down at her hands in her lap. “I wish we could stay long enough to learn all you have to teach us, but the universe needs us.”

A psychic wind--Fligg’s version of a sigh--swept through Allura. _I knew it would be so. I cannot stop you if you choose to leave now, but if you will listen to my counsel…_

“Of course, Master Fligg,” Allura said, bowing her head.

They hummed. _An ancient site exists, linked to your people’s power, called_ _Oriande_ _. You have learned what my people practice, what we passed onto your father and his red paladin, but Altea had its own crafts. Now that you have a foundation, their texts may be of use to you._

Allura’s pulse throbbed in her throat, and she had to force herself to swallow before she could speak. “Altean magic?”

_You know some of it already; it is what you have used to power your ship and to heal the Balmera. It makes Altean bodies malleable and allows you to control your form. But there was more to it than that, more even than I know. The magic of Oriande ran deeply, and the impression it left remains to this day._

“And you think this would help me to learn what the old Altean masters knew?”

Fligg was silent for a long moment, and Allura thought they might have slipped into a trance. Then they shook themself, their shoulders going slack. _We enter a time of great change. The future is never certain, but less so now than at other times. I do not know what you will find on Oriande, but I feel it is important._

Allura turned her gaze to the stream, letting the currents of water soothe her racing thoughts. A sacred site. She’d heard whispers of Oriande before, but even in her father’s time, no one visited it. The sages who had lived there guarded their borders closely.

She’d assumed Zarkon had destroyed it early in his conquest. If something remained, she wanted to find it.

“I will talk with the others,” she said, regulating her tone. “This is not my decision alone to make.”

Fligg had no mouth with which to smile, but Allura felt their satisfaction just the same.

She just hoped the universe could afford this last delay.

* * *

“Vrekking son of a shit-eating quiznak,” Nyma muttered, pulling back hard on Blue’s controls to avoid a security drone that had popped up out of nowhere.

Behind her, Beezer chirped a belated warning, and she pulled her eyes off the viewscreens long enough to give him a pointed look.

“I see it, thanks,” she said. “Next time, try to warn me _before_ I smash into it?”

Beezer buzzed, pointing out that she had not, in fact, smashed into it. Nyma would have argued that that was beside the point, but Blue chimed in just then with the signals off the base’s main security system. She supposed it made sense that the big guns in this sector would have extra beefy security, but that didn’t make it any less annoying. Pidge’s cloak worked against most scanners, but they’d also found intel on this station that pointed to it having every new and experimental security protocol available.

That meant keeping out of sight, just in case. Because avoiding the literal sea of drones wasn’t fun enough.

Blue was itching for a more direct approach, too. She could have taken out all those drones with a blast from her EM cannon—something Nyma had finally unlocked two months ago, after entirely too long getting by with the standard lasers. The problem was they couldn’t guarantee the cannon would knock out every system, and they couldn’t risk setting off an alert.

“Seriously,” Nyma grunted, darting around the edge of a shield pylon and cutting power to the thrusters. “This is the Greens’ area of expertise, _and_ their lion is teeny. Why not send her into this mess?”

Blue snapped back in mock offense, and Beezer silently brought up a display showing their other six pending stealth missions. Pidge and Ryner were already swamped with recon and prison breaks, which meant the others got stuck with all the sabotage. And by “the others,” they mainly meant Nyma, who had more experience with this sort of thing.

Didn’t mean she liked it, especially when the two resident robots decided to tag-team her with snark.

Nyma drifted forward, checking over the readouts arrayed around her while Beezer did another sweep of the area. “Looks like we’re clear,” she said. “Inside the drones’ perimeter, at least. Now we just need to sneak around back and we’re golden.”

Behind Nyma, there was a _thud_ and a hiss, followed by, “Holy _shit,_ did that actually work?”

Nyma yelped, fumbling for her bayard as she spun toward the intruder in the cockpit. Her mind spiraled, firing off questions rapid-fire: how someone had gotten inside, how long she’d been hiding, and how the hell Nyma, Beezer, and Blue _all_ hadn’t noticed her presence. Her pistol materialized in her hand, and she leveled it at the intrutder's head.

“Woah, hey! Watch where you’re pointing that thing. Jeez, talk about a welcome wagon.”

Nyma froze, finally snapping out of her panic long enough to register who it was standing before her. “ _Val?_ ”

“In the flesh!” Val said, spreading her arms wide. “Ta-da!”

Nyma stood, bayard still in hand, though it had reverted to its inactive form. It _was_ Val—or else a really good fake—with her hair pulled back into a high ponytail. She wore unfamiliar clothes, though she quickly ditched the cream-colored poncho, revealing a sleeveless white shirt underneath. She was smiling, but the expression slipped as Nyma continued to stare.

“Uh… Hello?” Val waved a hand in front of Nyma’s face. “Earth to Nyma. You still in there?”

Nyma leaned back, blinking to clear the obvious hallucination from her vision. Distantly, she registered that Blue had halted their forward momentum. Her presence in the bond felt like a frolicking yupper pup whose favorite handler had just come home, and Val’s dopey grin said she felt the reaction just as clearly as did Nyma.

“Aw, I missed you, too, baby girl.” Val reached up, pressing one hand against the ceiling. After a moment, she turned back to Nyma and rubbed the back of her neck. “Uh, sorry. Bad timing?”

Nyma pulled in a deep breath, shaking off her stupor. “Could be better, to be honest. But don’t worry about it. I—Are you actually here?”

“Yep.” Val stepped closer holding out her hand for a kiss. “Wanna feel?”

Nyma giggled and reached out, lifting Val's hand to her lips. To prove she was real. Not because they’d been apart for half a year and only together for a handful of weeks before that, and Nyma was missing the contact.

This was a purely academic kiss.

“How—?”

Beezer’s shrill whistle cut off Nyma’s question, alerting her to an approaching vessel, and she cursed, flinging herself back into the pilot’s seat. Lance’s seat. _Her_ seat, at least until the little brat got his ass back to the castle-ship. “Sorry, the reunion’s gonna have to wait. We’ve got company.”

Val had already taken the seat to Nyma’s right, swiping to pull readouts closer to her. “What are those? Security drones?” Val paused, sinking into the bond and gleaning an overview of the situation from Blue. “Got it. Three incoming. They haven’t raised an alarm yet; I don’t think they know you’re here.”

“I should hope the _chix_ not,” Nyma muttered. “Heading?”

The answer presented itself to Nyma before she was done asking, and she wheeled them around, shooting off toward the underside of the station. Only after she’d moved did she realize Val hadn’t answered verbally. Nyma felt her in the corner of her mind, their thoughts tangling together as the bond reasserted itself. Even after so long apart, the connection came as naturally as breathing, and Nyma relaxed into it, pulling them around to the shadow of a waste processor to wait out the drones.

Gods of all the cosmos… She’d missed this. She’d missed _Val._

“So...” Nyma said, turning toward Val and hoping her pounding heart didn’t show. “Magic.”

“Yup. Told you I’d be showing you soon.”

“Two months ago,” Nyma shot back. “So what is this? Teleportation?”

Val shook her head. “Nope. I’m still back with Matt and Allura on Quom.”

“But… you’re here.”

Val’s grin only grew, and she gave a little flourishing bow. “Back on Earth, we call it bilocation. Ironic, isn’t it?”

Nyma stared at her, unimpressed.

Val blinked. “You know. Because I’m bi? Bisexual, bilocation.”

“Yeah, no, I get it. That pun actually translates. I’m just not impressed.”

Val scrunched her nose up and smacked Nyma’s arm, then kicked her feet up on the console. “Yeah, okay. Play it cool, missy. _I_ know how awesome I am.”

“So awesome,” Nyma deadpanned. In truth, she _was_ impressed. When Val had left to learn magic, Nyma had anticipated something simple. Telekinesis, maybe elemental manipulation like Matt had. Not this. “You can just appear wherever? We’re a long way from Quom.”

Huffing, Val slumped in her seat. “Okay, well, yeah, my range sucks. Took me forever to get this thing to work at all, and I still can’t go much more than a mile away from me-prime without getting snapback.”

Nyma arched an eyebrow. “A mile? Val, I know I'm not, like, _super_ well-versed in human units, but--”

“I know, I know! This is a special case.”

“How so?”

Val flipped her hand. “I wasn’t even sure it would work, honestly. Fligg says even the masters of the art usually couldn’t make it to the moon of whatever planet they were on. No one’s ever left the system before. _But…_ I’ve got something the old masters didn’t have: a lion.”

Blue perked up, her presence pressing into the bond, some combination of curiosity and ego making everything taste sharp.

Val grinned. “We’re already linked, right? And Quintessence is the basis of that bond. So it’s like there’s already a little piece of me out here. I’ve just got to give it shape.”

“Huh.” Nyma shook her head. “Freaky.”

She turned forward, peeking through Val’s eyes to see that the patrol had passed. She nudged Blue, and they eased forward, drifting toward the back entrance.

“So… sabotage?” Val asked.

Nyma grunted. “Some sort of superweapon. I haven’t seen the specs on this thing, but none of the planets in the area will talk to us as long as it’s in play. Meri got us the blueprints, so all I’ve got to do is plant a couple bombs and get out again.” She paused. “You coming?”

“I don’t know if I _can_.” Val glanced at another set of scans as Blue anchored herself to the hull near the airlock. “Look, I’m here because Blue lets me project myself way farther than I otherwise could. But I don’t know how close to Blue I have to stick.”

“Well, only one way to find out, right?”

Val grimaced. “I suppose.” She stood together with Nyma, but paused to retrieve her poncho. “Don’t want to lose this. Magic doesn’t like paradoxes, apparently, so if I leave it here it might yank it back with me, or it might steal the one other me has. And I’ve already lost so many coats Fligg said they’re not giving me another one.”

Nyma cracked a smile at that, but it was half-hearted. Still, there was nothing to do but press on with the mission, so Nyma grabbed hold of Val’s hand and led the way down the ramp. The station’s artificial atmosphere extended far enough to encompass them, but the artificial gravity did not, which meant they had to propel themselves across the short gap. Nyma glanced at Val, gave her hand a squeeze, and jumped.

There was a brief tug, and for a second Nyma thought she might get wrenched off course. Then her hand closed on nothing, and she had just long enough to process that Val was gone before she slammed into the hull of the space station.

She turned, some part of her hoping that she was wrong, that Val had lost her grip but was still here. She would flash a smile, shrug, and apologize for being so clumsy.

But the darkness around Nyma was empty, and Blue confirmed it: Val was gone.

Disappointment curdled in Nyma’s gut, but she forced it down and activated her bayard, blasting a hole in the airlock. Not the stealthiest approach, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. It wasn’t like she’d planned on Val being along for this ride, anyway.

Just… she’d been here, and it had been nice.

Beezer followed Nyma into the hangar, buzzing an admonition, and Nyma shook herself. Right. They were here on a mission. Time to get moving.

* * *

The snapback hit Val like a bulldozer doing ninety down an icy highway, and it left her sprawled on her back on the rocky ground around Fligg’s mountain spring. Somewhere, someone was shouting, but Val’s head felt stuffed full of cotton. She hadn’t really noticed how far she’d stretched herself until the moment she stepped out of Blue’s cockpit and her Quintessence smacked her in the face like an overstretched rubber band.

So, okay, she could place her Quintessence inside Blue, but that didn’t make it another anchor point. If she wasn’t inside Blue, her Quintessence was going to try to connect her two bodies directly. That was good to know.

“Val!”

Allura dropped to one knee beside her, alarm plain on her face. Val’s face burned as she sat up. “Hey, sorry. I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?” Edi asked, her head popping up over Allura’s shoulder, because of course Val had to embarrass herself in front of everyone. “Even _I_ felt that one, and you know I’m not good with Quintessence.”

Val rubbed the back of her neck and glanced around. Fligg was making their way up the slope, unhurried, but Matt was nowhere to be found, which struck Val as odd. She flashed Edi a lopsided smile. “I’m good, promise. Pro tip, though: Don’t go slingshotting yourself around the universe for a kick. It’s a hell of a rush, but the hangover is a beast.”

Edi wrinkled her nose, as she did all too often when Val talked. Idioms didn’t translate well regardless of language, but humans and Galra in particular didn’t have a lot of touchstones to help the meaning come across. At least, not where Edi’s limited life experience intersected with Val’s penchant for colorful metaphors.

Sighing, Val ran her fingers through her hair, catching a few strands of the scraggly blue-green grass that braved the chill air and harsh winds of the mountains. “Seriously, though? I’m kinda sore, and I’m _hella_ tired, but nothing’s broken.”

 _It worked, then?_ Fligg asked, finally joining the rest of them by the spring. _You connected with your lion?_

“Yep.” Val couldn’t stop herself from grinning as Allura and Edi both gaped at her. “Nyma was there—out on a sabotage mission. We talked for a little bit, then decided to test out the limits of this little mystical cheat code.”

“Looks like you found the limit,” Allura said.

Val wrinkled her nose. “Yeah. Stick to the lion.” For now, anyway. Val wasn’t going to rule out the possibility of extending her range as she got better at the whole bilocation thing, or of finding a way to rout her Quintessence through Blue. It seemed like it ought to be possible; she just didn’t understand magic well enough to work out the bugs on her own.

But that was a problem for later. Preferably when her head wasn’t trying to spin like a Tilt-a-Whirl on a yacht. Part of her felt guilty for ditching Nyma so abruptly, and if she wasn’t feeling like crap, she might have turned right around and tried to go back.

Unfortunately, her body knew better than that. She doubted she’d be able to bilocate ten feet away right now, much less all the way across the universe.

“How long was I out of it? I know it took me a couple tries to connect, but… the in between is kinda fuzzy.”

That, and it still fucked with her mind to know she had another body somewhere that she couldn’t feel. The first time she’d bilocated, she’d thought it was plain old teleportation, only to hike back to a scene of panic as the others tried to get her unresponsive prime body to wake up. Seeing herself had been… a shock.

The whole day was still kind of a blur, but hearing Matt tell the story, Val had acted like she was high as a satellite and kept poking her prime body just to see that it was real. She still didn’t like bringing her two bodies close together, and she couldn’t usually hold it for more than a minute before the copy fizzled out. That would get easier with time, Fligg said. Lots of things would get easier with time. She’d be able to go farther, hold it longer, maybe even stay conscious of both bodies while she was split. So far she’d managed to keep both of them active for a short time, but they’d been completely separate—at least until she snapped back and spent an hour trying to put two sets of memories in order.

Practice. That was all she needed.

 _It was one of your hours this time,_ Fligg said. _Your Quintessence changed about ten minutes ago, so I would assume that’s when you connected._

“Sounds about right.” Val stood on shaky legs and stifled a yawn. She had no right to be this tired after ten measly minutes of exertion. “I think I need a nap.”

“I think you’ve earned it,” Allura said. “Go on and rest.”

“I’m not gonna miss anything fun, am I?”

Allura chuckled. “Not with you and Matt both down for the count. I’ll probably work one-on-one with Edi for a bit.”

Edi perked up, her excitement plain to see despite a perfunctory attempt to mask it, and Val managed a smile. The rest of what Allura said plucked at her, though, and she hesitated before heading down toward their bunker. “What happened with Matt?”

“Migraine,” Allura said. “I got a bit careless when we were sparring.”

Fligg’s stance shifted, perhaps in response to Allura’s understated guilty conscience, but they made no comment. Val understood Allura’s guilt, as well as her unspoken concern. They’d all been making significant strides in their studies, and Matt in particular had benefited from this experience.

Which only made it that much more frustrating that the migraines weren’t going away. Frustrating, and worrisome. Sure, Quintessence was thicker here than most places in the universe, and most of their enemies didn’t use pure Quintessence the way Allura did—but the druids’ magic probably did. What would happen if a migraine hit Matt in the middle of battle? Val didn’t want to say anything Matt might take as a suggestion he step back from the fight, because she knew that would never happen.

For now, she would just keep hoping things would get better on their own and trust Matt to know his own limits.

He was asleep when Val got back to the bunker, his grass-stuffed pillow pulled over his head and his legs tucked up to his chest. Val’s heart twinged in sympathy, but she was swaying on her feet, so she crossed to her bed, collapsed, and fell asleep almost instantly.

* * *

Nyma set the final charge, the skin on the back of her neck prickling as imagined enemies snuck up behind her. Didn’t matter that Beezer was there, watching for more than just visible cues they had company. The plain fact was, Nyma wasn’t used to silence when she did missions. Rolo had always kept up a cheerful commentary as they worked, teasing snarky responses out of Nyma, who had a tendency to shut down when things got tough. Shut down, or fall back on her old bubbly, air-headed mask.

It wasn’t a bad thing, that tendency toward single-minded focus. It was just how she was. But she’d gotten used to Rolo’s chatter, and she’d come to expect the same from her fellow Blues. The last six months had made her fall back into old habits—and she’d been _fine_ , right up until Val showed up and got Nyma’s head spinning, trying to fabricate the odd little comparisons to Earth culture Val seemed to have for everything they ran across.

 _Focus on the job, Nyma_ , she chided herself. She’d lost a good ten seconds squinting at the dark corners of the maintenance space she was in, trying to place a particular memory she’d glimpsed in someone else’s head.

At length, the charge was set, synced with the others, and ticking down toward detonation. That left her a little more than ten minutes to get out of here before the whole place blew.

Thank the cosmos. This had been a long mission—far longer than it had any right to be. Meri’s intel hadn’t included the patrol routes for station security, and Nyma found herself backtracking time and again as she navigated from one point of interest to the next. Hunk had said a charge at each of the twin power cores would take the weapon offline for a while, but if they wanted to scrap it, they needed to hit six more structural cornerstones.

Blue’s cloaking had run down after the third charge, and she’d been forced to retreat to the blind spot Beezer had identified inside one of the exhaust ports. It was the only place big enough for Blue to fit, but it was also halfway around the station. She could move on her own, sometimes fire her lasers, but the cloak was something Pidge had added, and Blue had a hard time interfacing with the system.

Which, of course, meant she couldn’t circle back to Nyma’s point of entry without exposing herself to every scanner this side of Treglan 5.

“All right,” Nyma whispered, tapping Beezer’s casing to get him moving. “Let’s get out of here.”

She summoned her bayard, if only to feel the comforting weight of her rifle. She hadn’t needed it so far, and she hoped that wouldn’t change, but she’d never quite adapted to a weapon that vanished when she wasn’t using it. Without a pistol on her hip or a rifle slung over her shoulder, she felt too vulnerable.

She been in that position before. She didn’t want to repeat it.

They started down the hallway at a creep, ears and scanners pricked for signs of an approaching patrol. Beezer seemed to have been analyzing their routes—or else Pidge had upgraded his scanners without telling her—because he had them ducking into closets before Nyma knew what they were hiding from.

Their path so far hadn’t taken them this deep into the superweapon—back past the focusing lenses and the power supplies, past the control rooms and the stabilizers, back to a section that was all exhaust ducts and supply rooms. It was eerily quiet, the low, purple-tinted lights giving the place the feel of a mausoleum.

She could feel Blue up ahead, tension, worry, and impatience gathering at the base of Nyma’s skull with every passing second.

 _I’m coming,_ Nyma thought, gritting her teeth as another patrol passed beyond a closed door. _Gods. Calm down, before you bust a valve or something, okay?_

Blue growled, but gave no other response, and Nyma’s shoulders crept toward her ears as she listened to the passing footsteps. She clutched her bayard in two hands, barely resisting the urge to sprint out into the hall and take aim. The countdown on her visor was still ticking, dwindling now to a third of what she’d started with.

Beezer whistled, and Nyma turned to shush him, only to find him standing by a computer console, already jacked in.

The room, now that Nyma cared to look, was dark and cramped, but a row of terminals lined the far wall. Some kind of communications hub, maybe? An archive room? Nyma reached out for one of the consoles, then snatched her hand back as she remembered the timer.

“Grab what you can in the next thirty seconds,” she whispered to Beezer. “We can’t risk any longer than that.”

He chirped, and Nyma counted the seconds on her timer. As the timer rolled over at two minutes, she reached out again, but Beezer was already pulling back, binary scrolling past on his eyeplate for another second before he shook himself and signaled that he was clear.

Nyma flashed a smile, then led them back into the hall. She gave up on stealth now, charging full-tilt toward Blue’s nebulous presence up ahead. Two guard patrols appeared in her path. She shot them down without slowing her pace, then sealed her helmet as Blue roared a warning—roughly two seconds before she slammed into the hull, tearing through with a shriek of rending metal.

Nyma winced and veered aside as the hallway before her opened up. Blue pulled back, realigning as Nyma flung herself into open space, correcting her trajectory with a short burst from her jets. Behind her, Beezer did the same, and they landed side-by-side inside Blue’s mouth.

The lasers were already flying thick by the time Nyma reached the cockpit, and she leaned heavy on the thrusters even before she oriented herself to their position. The station’s native defenses were on high alert, and some of the nearest drones had picked up on the commotion, indicator lights burning crimson as they turned to scan for the intruder.

“Aw, shit,” Nyma groaned, throwing them into a spin. She didn’t waste time returning fire, not with the base less than a minute from going critical. A laser clipped Blue’s back leg as she pulled out, and they tumbled, Beezer screeching a protest from the back of the cockpit. “Yeah, yeah, I _know_!”

Grunting, Nyma pulled back hard on the controls, then lurched right, letting a hail of lasers slip past her to open up a hole in the drones’ defensive line. She looped around, cursing again as Blue took another hit, and shot through the opening she’d created.

A few seconds later, the superweapon exploded, the blast turning them for a loop that left Nyma momentarily floundering as her vision went fuzzy. It took her a moment to realize it was Blue who had briefly blacked out, the wave of concentrated Quintessence overloading her for an instant.

Then she stabilized, and Nyma pulled them around, grinning at the debris field she’d left behind.

“Let’s see you threaten anyone with _that_ ,” she spat. She turned, looking automatically to Val’s seat before she remembered she was alone. The silence dampened her spirits, and she pulled them around, grudgingly opening a wormhole to the far side of the sector, then jumping from there to the shadow of a forested moon.

It was only here that she finally stopped, letting go of the controls and slumping in her seat, her heart pounding. “Well, I’d call that a success.”

Blue purred her agreement, and Beezer chimed in with a rattling mix of joy and irritation, and Nyma reached out to pat him.

“Sorry for the rough ride, Beez. Did you find anything interesting on that computer back there?”

He gave a noncommittal whistle, and they brought up a file list on the main console. Beezer had managed to pull an awful lot of info in under a minute, and of course none of the file names were descriptive enough to sort payroll from disciplinary reports from high priority missives from Zarkon’s private frequency.

With a sigh, Nyma opened the first file and started chipping away.

* * *

Karen squeezed the trigger three times in quick succession and a tight triangle of burns appeared on the target at the other end of the range. Not quite a bullseye, but her precision was improving.

“Better,” Keena said. “You’re finally starting to relax.”

Karen held her pose for a moment, then lowered her pistol. The uneasy flutter rushed back in as soon as she stepped off her mark, and she holstered the gun with sharp relief. “I’m not sure I’d call this _relaxed,_ ” she muttered.

Keena waved a hand. “I didn’t say it was _perfect._ You still hold that thing like it’s going to blow up in your hand the next time you fire it.”

“That’s because for all I know, it will.” Karen pulled off her goggles—both a safety measure and a targeting aid—and set them aside. “I barely trust my planet’s guns not to turn against me; it’s going to take a while for me to get comfortable with lasers.”

“And that’s _fine_.” Keena tossed her a water packet, flashing a smile. “You’re doing great, Karen. Really!”

Something about Keena’s tone grated on Karen’s nerves, and it was an effort to return the smile instead of snapping. It was petty and uncalled for, this dislike for Keena, and Karen knew it. She’d been poisoned before she ever met Keena by Matt’s opinion of her, while Keena herself had never done anything that might indicate she was anything less than amiable.

It didn’t matter, though. Karen just didn’t like Keena, and all the chipper smiles and helpful tips in the world couldn’t seem to change that fact. Maybe Keena was playing a game—though if she was, she was far too subtle for Karen to see what lurked beneath the mask. Maybe she simply connected with Karen in a way she couldn’t with Keith.

Maybe Karen was overthinking everything.

She drained the water packet in a single pull, still thirsty from the hand-to-hand training that had preceded the visit to the range. Karen’s aim actually wasn’t bad for someone who hadn’t touched a gun until last month, but it deteriorated quickly when she was under pressure, fatigued, or otherwise distracted. Keena wasn’t ready to graduate Karen to field exercises just yet, but she’d gone for the next best thing: running Karen ragged for an hour at the gym, then hustling her over to the range for some advanced target practice.

 _Never know when you’re gonna have to run and shoot,_ she liked to say. _Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll always be in control of the situation._

That was sound advice, and probably quite helpful. It was also downright infuriating when put into practice.

“Thanks again for training me,” Karen said as politely as she could. Because when it came right down to it, she was grateful. Karen enjoyed Antok’s company far more than Keena’s, but she couldn’t deny that Keena was the better teacher for someone like her. She preferred ranged combat, for one, and when she had to get in close she relied on swift, intentional strikes. She knew what it was like to face larger, stronger opponents; for all she was built like a pro wrestler, she was quite short for a Galra. A few inches taller than Karen, perhaps, but closer to Karen’s strength than Antok’s.

It meant that Karen had already begun to learn how to use her opponents’ size and strength against them. She ended every spar on the floor aching from Keena’s strikes, and it would be months—years, maybe—before she could even think about winning a match. But she _was_ learning.

Keena grabbed a second water packet for herself, but instead of drinking it, she ripped the top seam open with her teeth and dumped the contents on her head, the flicking of her ears spraying droplets everywhere. “Hey, don’t mention it. It’s not often I get to blow off steam like this. You know how it is. Everyone at work expects me to act a certain way. You’re one of the only people on New Altea who doesn’t have those expectations of me.”

Karen hesitated in the middle of grabbing a towel out of her bag. After a moment, she forced herself to keep moving, wiping the sweat from her face so Keena wouldn’t see the conflict in her eyes.

She felt bad for Keena; really she did. It couldn’t be easy to run an entire spy network, and Keena didn’t exactly have an extensive social network. But at the same time, Karen continuously found herself second-guessing everything Keena said.

She wished Matt would just tell her why he hated Keith’s mother so much. Maybe then she’d be able to let go of this irrational distrust.

She and Keena returned to the gym together to shower and change out of the close-fitting uniforms they used for training, and Karen took that time to breathe, letting her overactive bullshit-detector wind down.

“So,” Keena said as they left, each with a bag slung over their shoulder. “Any plans for tonight?”

“The usual,” Karen said.

“Working on the treaty again?” Keena asked, a teasing lilt to her voice. “Vrekt. They’ve really got you—what’s the phrase? Busting your ass on this thing.”

Karen snorted, consciously loosening her grip on her bag’s strap. “Well, the summit is coming up quick. We need to have something ready to present.”

“It’s just going to get ripped apart once the politicians get their hands on it.”

“Maybe,” Karen said, perhaps a little more snippy than she might have been. “But at least it will be somewhere to start.”

Keena held up her hands, laughing. “I know, I know! Calm down, woman. You’re doing good work. And it’s important! I get it. I just want to know that you’re taking care of yourself.”

Steps slowing, Karen eyed Keena. “You _do_?”

“Of course!” Keena reached out, giving Karen’s shoulder a gentle shove. “You have a habit of throwing yourself into things, you know. And you don’t ever seem to stop when normal people would.”

“That would be the Holt stubbornness,” Karen said, flashing a tentative smile. “Don’t tell the neighbors, but I think I might be the source of that particular design flaw in our family.”

Keena’s shoulders shook, and she let her gait loosen as she meandered down the street. It was getting toward evening, and both streets and sky were clogged with people headed home from work. Keena seemed unconcerned with it all, even sparing a wave and a friendly holler for someone she recognized on the opposite corner.

“Oh, that’s right!” Keena spun on her toes, walking backwards so she was facing Karen. "I meant to ask—did you think about that thing we were talking about before?”

“The clause about refugees and free-flying allies?” Karen asked. Her throat closed just thinking about it—ostensibly a clause that would ensure protection for groups freed from prisons or labor colonies, people who left in search of missing friends and family, and people otherwise displaced by the Empire. _Just an assurance that these people have our protection even if they leave their planets—so long as they don’t attack our allies._

Keena claimed it was out of sympathy for families like Wyn’s who had left New Altea in search of a better life, and in so doing had forfeited New Altea’s protections. Karen couldn’t stop searching for ulterior motives.

 _Stop,_ she told herself. _You’re letting Matt’s opinion cloud your own._

“I have, actually,” she said. “I can’t promise anything, of course, but I’ll talk to Shiro and Coran about it.”

Keena positively beamed at that. “You’re the _best_ , Karen. Seriously, the Coalition is so lucky to have you!”

Karen’s brow furrowed. “I’m not doing anything someone else couldn’t.”

“Okay, sure. Whatever you say.” Keena waved a hand. “So are you going?”

“To the summit? I’m not sure yet.”

“You should!” Keena turned, her steps bouncing as she continued on to the intersection where they would part ways. “And if you do, maybe I could come along? I can’t go in an official capacity, considering… you know. But I do want to be there. To hear what these people have to say.”

Right. Because that was all she’d be doing—listening. Karen managed a smile, but shrugged. “I’m not sure I’m the one you should be asking about that, but… I suppose it can’t hurt to check.” And to warn Shiro that Keena might try to interfere.

No, that wasn’t fair. Keena hadn’t _done_ anything. Not as long as Karen had known her. Okay, so she was too cheery for it to not be an act, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have good intentions underneath it all.

Nevertheless, Karen couldn’t help the sour twist in her gut as Keena thanked her and went on her way, humming to herself like she hadn’t a care in the world.

Karen turned away a few seconds later, heading home with a leaden feeling in her gut.

* * *

Val woke to an empty stomach. The light outside was fading, and Matt had joined the others around the fire pit where they usually had dinner—ration packs from their shuttle, supplemented by nuts, berries, and tubers they’d gathered from the foothills. Val had gathered, mostly. She’d been trying to train herself to bring things with her when she snapped back. It was inconsistent at best, but it was better than actually hiking down there every time they ran out of real food.

Matt smiled as she joined them, offering her a bowl of space hermit porridge and a cup of water. She took both gratefully and finished them in two minutes. She leaned forward to serve herself another helping and finally noticed Matt’s tension.

Val looked around the circle, from Fligg (unreadable, as always) to Edi (plainly not privy to whatever was going on) to Allura.

“Fligg and I were talking earlier,” Allura said without prompting. Her tone gave nothing away, but her dinner remained mostly untouched, and she kept glancing at Matt as though expecting him to interject. “They believe we have learned nearly as much as is reasonable to expect in a short period of time. From here, we can only practice what we already know.”

“So...” Val tapped her spoon against the side of the bowl. “We’re going home?”

Allura pressed her lips together. “That is the question, isn’t it? Fligg mentioned an ancient Altean holy site they think might be important to our fight.”

“We don’t know what we’ll find there, exactly,” Matt said, staring at the campfire. “Or how long it’ll take. We have a direction to start us off, but the actual temple is hidden somewhere.”

Edi’s lips parted as she stared at him, then at Allura, who breathed a sigh.

“Matt’s correct. In the interest of honest communication, I would like to go, but I know we may not have time. That’s why I wanted everyone’s input.”

“We should go!” Edi cried. “The ancient Alteans—they’re the people who made Voltron, aren’t they?”

“Our alchemists did, yes. Our sages... Well, I'm not exactly sure what they could do. They lived half in the realm of children's fancies. But I do know they had skills ordinary Alteans could never hope to match.” Allura placed a hand on Edi’s head and glanced to the others.

Matt growled in frustration. “It’s not that I don’t _want_ to go,” he said, all tensed up like he was already midway through an argument. And who knew, maybe that’s exactly what Val had walked in on. “I get why you want to go. It’s just that we’ve been gone so long. What if this turns out to be nothing? The team needs us.”

Val cocked her head to the side. She remembered Blue’s overwhelming relief at having her close again. It had been easy to wave it off in the moment, but underneath the joy, there had been definite fear. Blue didn’t like her paladins going where she couldn’t protect them. And the funny thing was Val had felt some of that same restlessness herself over the most recent weeks, like something in her was itching to get back to her lion.

She wondered if Matt had felt it, too.

“Well,” Val said, “where’s this lead we have? Can we at least check that out and see whether or not this is going to turn into a wild goose chase? We can always follow-up later, right? This isn’t anything time-sensitive.”

“It’s not,” Allura said.

 _But I would caution you against delay,_ Fligg said. _The fight grows more frantic with each day. I cannot guarantee that you will have time to do this in the future._

Val opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Hmmph. Okay, look. On the one hand, I’m with Matt. I kinda want to get back to the others. On the other hand, I’m a journalist, and you can’t just plop a secret in my lap and tell me not to go digging.”

That startled a laugh out of Matt, and even Allura relaxed a little bit, a smile tugging at her lips.

“We should check it out.” Matt seemed to have to force the words out, but he nodded once he had and looked up at Allura. “We’ll give it a week, and if we haven’t found anything, we’ll reevaluate.”

“That’s more than fair,” Allura said. She smiled at Matt, who smiled back, and Edi’s ears shook with excitement. She hastily ducked her head and shoveled more food into her mouth, and the conversation turned to easier things.

Matt must not have napped for long earlier, because he went to bed not long after Allura and Edi, and Fligg lasted only a little while longer. Soon it was just Val sitting there by the dregs of the campfire, poking at the coals with a stick. Her mind was stuffed too full of thoughts to meditate, her body too fresh from what must have been five or six hours asleep to try again so soon.

Staring at the flames, she felt herself begin to split, Quintessence leaking out of her and questing outward in the direction of her thoughts. She pulled it back automatically, but then she hesitated.

It would have to be a short trip, just long enough to apologize for disappearing, but she was well rested, and it was easy to absorb Quintessence from this valley to augment what was already inside her. And it wasn’t like she was going to sleep anytime soon, anyway. It might help to wear herself out, just so she wasn’t running on empty tomorrow.

This was probably a bad idea, but there was no one around to stop her, so Val straightened her spine, breathed in deeply, and let herself get lost in the motion of the dancing flames.

* * *

Hours later, Nyma was out of patience but close enough to the end of the files for stubbornness to carry her through. So far it had mostly been administrative files, which she’d left to Beezer and Blue for preliminary analysis. They’d flag it with anything noteworthy they uncovered, then forward it all to Pidge’s master database, where they analyzed trends and characterized the infrastructure of the Empire.

Boring shit. ...Important, but still boring. So far, Nyma had found only two files worth reading through: first, a missive from _the_ _Lady Haggar, High Prince of Lord Zarkon, Chief Druid, Emperor's Hand_ _,_ and all-around blowhard with way too big an ego. The missive explained that this line of deterrent was too expensive to be viable long-term, and that they would not be receiving the shipment of crystals they’d requested, as they had been diverted to something called Project Vindication. Second, she found a log of “insurrections” in the system—things that had put the weapon on standby, occasionally even brought it to bear on the planet in question. It had only been fired once, shortly after its completion, and that had been enough to keep people docile for the last fifty years.

They’d already received calls from a few of these worlds, reached out to one or two more that showed up in the castle-ship’s backlog of distress calls, but there were plenty of names here they hadn’t seen before. Nyma would have to get Shiro in on this. Coran, Akira, and the Guard, too, if they wanted to reach out to everyone before the Galra had a chance to implement another form of intimidation.

Nyma brought up Haggar’s message again, her fists clenching at the words _Project Vindication._ This message gave no indication what that project might be, but considering Haggar was involved, and considering the bullshit Project Balmera had encompassed, Nyma wasn’t feeling particularly optimistic. She’d have to try to get in touch with Meri, see if she could dig up any details.

The air in the cockpit changed, and this time Blue purred a warning before Val could scare Nyma out of her skin.

“Hey.”

Nyma’s skin tingled as Val reached out, hand hovering over her shoulder for a moment before it settled and slid down Nyma’s breastplate toward her sternum. Nyma tilted back, pleasure rushing to her head as her eyes met Val’s.

“Hey, yourself,” Nyma said. “Glad to see you’re okay. I was starting to get worried when you disappeared like that.”

Val huffed, then leaned down, capturing Nyma’s lips in a kiss. “Nah,” she said, pulling back far too soon. “Just lost my grip. Wore me out, so I slept it off. But I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“You know me,” Nyma said, flashing a winning smile. “I can handle myself.”

Val blinked, then broke into a grin. “Of course. Silly me.” She pushed off the back of Nyma’s chair and came around the side, where she hesitated, glancing at her own chair, which sat just out of arm’s reach from Nyma’s current position. With a huff, Val perched on the arm of Nyma’s chair and leaned over, her hair brushing Nyma’s headtails and making her shiver. “So, what’d you find?”

“A lot of nothing.” Nyma cleared her throat and tried to ignore the heat rising in her cheeks. “This list should help us get in touch with the people in this sector. With luck, we’ll find ourselves a couple new allies before we’re done.”

“That’s awesome! How’s the Coalition doing, anyway?”

Nyma wrinkled her nose. “No one wants to commit, really. Half a dozen planets, maybe. Shiro’s got his hands full planning this big summit to bring all the ‘neutral parties’ together.”

“Oh? When’s this happening?”

Pursing her lips, Nyma thought back to when Akira had laid it all out for her. She’d only barely been paying attention, since she probably wouldn’t be there for most of it. The war waited for no paladin and all that. “Next week? Maybe the week after that, I’m not sure. Why?”

Val shook her head. “We were just talking today. There’s some old Altean place Fligg wants us to find, but we’re not sure how long it’ll take. I’m surprised Allura wasn’t pushing to be back before this summit.”

“She might not know,” Nyma said. “From what I hear, Shiro doesn’t want her to cut her training short on his account.”

“Uh-huh...” Val slid off the arm of Nyma’s chair, stretching her arms over her head. “Well, we’ll let Allura make that call, hmm? Anyway, I should get going. Early morning tomorrow. Just wanted to pop by before you assumed the worst.”

“Sure,” Nyma said, trying not to show how much she wanted to ask Val to stay. “This gonna be a regular thing?”

“Of course,” Val said, planting one hand on her hip. “I’ve got to practice, don’t I? Besides, we’ll probably have lots of boring time flying around searching for Altealantis. Altea Dorado? Meh.” She waved her hand. “Whatever. I’ll come around as often as I can.”

Nyma smiled, catching Val’s hand as she stepped back and squeezing it. “It’s good to have you back, even if you do have to fling yourself across the universe to make it happen.”

Val flushed, her grin getting just a little bit wider as she squeezed back, then let go of Nyma’s hand and retreated to the center of the cockpit. “See you,” she said, and vanished in a blink.


	18. A Change in the Routine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Pidge and Ryner have been investigating prisons Pidge flagged as likely destinations for their father after his capture nearly two years ago. So far they've turned up nothing, but they have one prison left to hit. Green and her paladins continue to coordinate with the other paladins and the Guard--it was thanks to Pidge's intel and Hunk's engineering advice that Nyma was able to successfully destroy one of Zarkon's superweapons. In so doing, she found a missive from Haggar referencing something called Project Vindication.

Pidge held their breath as they peered through a vent at the dim corridor below. Two Galra stood guard outside a door just at the edge of Pidge’s line of sight, one of them tapping his finger against the rifle leaning on his shoulder. If Pidge’s intel was right, it was nearing the end of their shift. They’d both be tired, bored, and inattentive. Or as inattentive as they ever got.

A pair of sentries passed directly under Pidge’s hiding spot, clapping hands to chest in salute as they neared the guards.

“Vrepit sa,” the sentries said perfect sync. The guards echoed with somewhat less vigor.

“I’m in position,” Pidge whispered, tapping the side of their helmet to send a visual feed to Ryner. “Just two guards. Shouldn’t take long.”

“Hold your position, Pidge,” Ryner warned. “I ran into a patrol on my way in, but I’ll be there in another minute.”

Pidge hummed, irritation building beneath their skin. They’d been planning this mission with Ryner for over a week—and that wasn’t counting the endless nights of flipping through a scattering of files from Thace’s chip and Pidge’s own exploits. This was the fourth and final prison their algorithm had pinged as a potential transfer for their father after his capture. Initially, they’d deemed it the least likely option—of the four, it had the tightest security, and two years ago, a single human prisoner shouldn’t have warranted the extra provisions.

But the other prisons had all turned up nothing, which meant all of Pidge’s hopes were riding on today. They just wanted to get on with it already.

They counted to twenty, and then the urge to move was too much. “Screw this,” they muttered. “Ryner, it’s two guards. I’m going in.”

“Pidge! Don’t--”

Pidge ignored the rest of Ryner’s sentence as they shifted, tucking their knees against their chest and kicking the vent cover off. They followed it down into the corridor, activating their bayard as the cover hit the ground with a clatter. The guards by the control room door startled, one nearly dropping his gun even as the other opened fire.

She hadn’t bothered to aim, and Pidge skidded on their knees under the lasers, cutting the guard’s legs out from under her. She toppled, and Pidge sliced the other guard’s gun in half. He stumbled back, staring in horror at his ruined weapon, and Pidge tased him before he regained his wits.

Behind, there was a scrape of plastic and the crackle of comms. Pidge spun, kicking the communicator from the female guard’s hand before she could get an alert out. The woman bared her teeth, rolling backwards as Pidge swung for her chest. Their bayard kicked up sparks as it left a deep gash in the floor, and the woman regained her footing, pressing one hand against the floor. She sprang forward, arms outstretched to carry Pidge to the ground, but they were faster, ducking to one side and firing their bayard. The blade sunk into the guard’s back, and Pidge lit her up.

She gasped, spasmed, and collapsed beside her companion.

Pidge straightened, heart pounding. “See?” they asked the empty corridor. “Piece of cake.”

Ryner darted around the corner a few seconds later, her face set into a deep scowl. The pistol wrapped around her right hand uncurled, reverting to a nondescript green bracer. “That was reckless.”

Pidge rolled their eyes. “Please. Like I haven’t dealt with worse before.” They crouched beside the door, examining the lock as Rover finally poked his pointy little head out of the vents. “Looks like a standard lock.”

Rover beeped, but hurried to Pidge’s side to interface with the lock. A few seconds later, he produced the relevant access code, and the lock flashed blue a moment before the door slid open.

A laser streaked by over Pidge’s head, and they ducked—though clearly the shooter had been aiming for someone taller. Whoever it was cursed, and Pidge rushed in, lassoing Shooty McTrigger Finger and flinging him into the other officer in the room. Both of them slammed against the far wall, and Pidge electrocuted them, just to be safe.

Pidge glanced once more around the room, just to be sure there was nothing else waiting to jump on them, then helped Ryner drag the two guards into the room with them. Hopefully passing sentries wouldn’t think it was odd to have the control room unattended. The next guard shift wasn’t scheduled to start for half an hour—plenty of time to do what they’d come for.

“Control room is ours,” Pidge said, switching to the open comms channel. “Give us thirty seconds and we’ll have a path cleared for you.”

“Copy that,” Akira said. “Beginning our approach.”

Ryner gave Pidge one last, exasperated look, then moved to the main console while they set up at one of the other terminals. The others had the rescue more than covered—with Ryner at the controls and Akira’s squad clearing the cell block? They’d be done in no time.

Pidge had more important questions to answer.

* * *

Sam stepped into the lab’s main computer, and for a moment he lost track of himself. So many programs running at once, so many directories vying for his attention. His mind fractured, splitting off in every direction at once.

Even now, so long after he’d first done this, it brought a momentary surge of panic. There was always the worry that he would lose himself. That he would delve too deep, spread himself too thin. That he would lose something in the computer. Hell, maybe he already had. How would he know? He’d already been beaten down, molded into something fragile and frightened, and though he’d rebuilt himself, he was under no illusions that he was the same man who had left Earth so many lifetimes ago.

He held, riding the currents of Quintessence and information that churned within the computer, and after a moment things calmed. He remembered himself, rediscovered the edges of his consciousness, and pulled himself back to a single point of compacted will.

Interfacing with Galra systems through this odd technopathy he’d acquired wasn’t as simple as strolling in and taking what he wanted. Making something go wrong was one thing—even activating a specific process was easy enough. But gleaning information was a slow process, involving an awful lot of mental decryption and feeding much of what he found through Rolo, who unlike Sam could actually read Galran.

It would have been so much easier if Rolo had Sam’s affinity for the fine details of computer work. But he, like Matt, was the engineer to Sam’s programmer. Neither of them could have done this alone, but they complemented each other quite well.

Sam moved quickly, following his usual path into the files pertaining to ongoing experiments. The filing system at this lab was horrendously obtuse, but Sam had memorized the paths well enough, and he came soon enough to the files he wanted. At first, he’d searched specifically for records pertaining to himself or to Rolo, hoping to determine what the Galra were doing to them.

That had proven to be a mistake, as the dry daily reports made very few references to the intent behind the experiments, and finding out that the druids were systematically cutting the ties between his soul and his body was almost as far from comforting as Sam could imagine.

Rolo had, of course, tried to explain the difference between souls and Quintessence, but Sam remained unconvinced. The experiments had resulted in him being able to step out of his body; as far as he was concerned, the semantics of the situation made very little difference.

Today, Sam was trying a new tactic.

Files were nebulous things in this space, their contents even more so. Sam had learned to navigate by rote, remembering how things were arranged and distinguishing files by their size and age. His mind raced out along lines of Quintessence, filtering through dense clusters of raw data and inconsequential filigree latices. His target—some of the oldest files in the lab, detailing the lab’s founding and the goals of the research—was just where he’d left it, untouched.

Sam found the file he wanted. It was one of the larger files, as the small, easily translated ones so far had contained information of minimal use: staff registries, budget proposals, and the like. Most of it meant nothing to Sam and Rolo, and the rest they could glean from the things they’d seen first-hand.

Sam reached out with his mind, stepping from the computer’s memory to the mechanical aspects of its construction, illuminating indicator lights in a specific pattern. The druids wouldn’t notice anything out of the ordinary—hopefully—but Rolo was watching for the signal to create a distraction.

Sure enough, a moment later Sam felt something. He was so deep in the computer that he couldn’t touch the other machines in the lab, but he felt the ripples of Rolo’s influence. Sam waited for a moment, then projected his chosen file onto one of the lesser-used screens near the end of the row. He stepped out of the files at the same moment, his mind automatically resuming a human form as he appeared beside Rolo.

Beyond him was a scene of chaos. Rolo’s body lay lifeless on the exam table in the center of the room, a headset cradling his scalp. The imaging machine seemed to have shorted out, leaving a massive black stain on the wall. The screens flickered wildly--possibly related, probably not--and the imager itself whirred ominously. If Sam didn't know better, he would have worried for Rolo's safety, and both the druids overseeing the experiments and the sentries they’d brought in as a safeguard had rushed over to contain the situation.

“Rolo,” Sam said.

“They were expecting it,” Rolo said shortly. He was bent over the computer scanning the file as quickly as he could. The power surge, or whatever it was Rolo had done to the imager, wouldn’t hold the druids’ attention for long, so Rolo couldn’t afford to argue when he should be gathering information.

Sam acknowledged this fact and held his tongue, but he wasn't happy about it. In putting on such a dramatic display, Rolo had given up one of their few advantages. True, the druids knew their experiments often conferred technopathic abilities on the test subjects. True, one of the recent files they’d found indicated the druids were growing suspicious that Rolo hadn’t yet displayed such abilities.

But Sam’s own awakening had also triggered the end of this stage of experimentation, or so he guessed. And while Rolo’s reach had expanded to the point that he no longer needed to be in the lab to come here, it was a strain, and Sam was in no rush to see what the druids had in mind for the later stages of their experiments.

But it was too late now. The druids would realize Rolo had triggered the short, though with luck they would assume it was unconscious.

"Anything?" Sam asked.

Rolo hummed. "Lots of pretty words to fill space. For the glory of the Emperor, and all that."

"Damn."

Sam watched closely as the druids switched off the imager, then turned their attention to Rolo’s body. At the computer, Rolo grunted.

“Looks like we’re out of time,” Sam said.

Rolo nodded, then flickered as one of the researchers powered down the device they called the decoupler, which forced Rolo's Quintessence to separate from his body. On the exam table, he drew in a shuddering breath, curling in on himself as much as the restraining hands of the sentries would allow. Sam’s heart ached, but he kept his eyes on the computer as he hastily closed out of the records and erased any trace of his meddling.

He stuck close to Rolo for the long, slow march back to their cell.

* * *

Akira hated the sickly purple haze that filled Galra ships, hated the empty silence and the smell of metal that reminded him too much of blood. Every time he led an infiltration like this, it reminded him that this had been Takashi’s life for a year. Hell, this was the sort of place Keith had grown up in, and in far too many ways he’d been as much a prisoner as Takashi.

Some days, Akira just wanted to muster the entire Guard and see how many warships they could take out before they met their bloody end.

More often, he channeled his rage into more productive goals. Pidge had been gutting Zarkon’s prison system, mapping out every little nexus of captivity and pain, and Akira had taken every opportunity to hit prisons with his men. He was needed more and more for administrative work, as Layeni had her hands full with training, but sometimes he just needed to be out here to see that he was doing real good in the universe.

He just wished it didn’t make him sick to his stomach.

Imelda and Jeya stood across the hallway from Akira, backs against the wall, pistols up and ready for a firefight. Layeni was back on the castle-ship, neck-deep in the latest round of training—not new recruits, for once, but the first generation of drill instructors. The Guard was finally beginning to resemble and honest-to-god military force, and by the end of the week Layeni might be able to take a step back and let other people handle the new recruits.

Layeni’s squad—Terra One—had learned to run missions without their squad leader, and they’d insisted on joining Akira on this run. _We know Commander Holt won’t be there,_ Jordan had said, _but if we can take even one small step closer to finding him, we want to be there._

Akira could hardly blame the man. He’d studied under Commander Holt, as had Imelda, the other Garrison alumna in the Guard. Akira, having been cargo class, had only met the man a handful of times, but even without stories from Takashi, Pidge, and Matt, Akira knew what sort of man Commander Holt was. He had a reputation on campus for being one of the most approachable officers, and more sympathetic than someone like Iverson.

It was a testament to the camaraderie of Terra One that Imelda and Jordan’s teammates were equally committed to bringing Commander Holt home.

“All right, Akira,” Ryner said. “I’ve cleared your path as much as I can. Unfortunately, this place is too small to try to draw the guards away from their post without tipping them off and bringing the whole crew down on your head.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Akira said. “Automated security is more than enough. We’ll handle the rest from here; you just make sure they don’t try to block our exit.”

“Copy that.”

“You hear that, team?” Akira said. “Looks like we’re going to have to put a little effort into this rescue, after all.”

Jordan cursed. “And here I was hoping for some genuine catharsis.”

Someone chuckled—Henrok, Akira thought. He and Ivka, the two Galra on this squad, had stolen guard uniforms to try blend in with the base’s staff while Jordan watched their backs. The three of them would come in second and try to disrupt whatever response the Empire mounted against Akira’s jailbreak.

Akira nodded to Imelda and Jeya, and the three of them pressed onward, taking the hall in single file with Akira leading the charge. This base, Korrent 237, only held a dozen prisoners, with an equivalent number of guards. It was classified as high security, but Akira was pretty sure that was all down to the security system, which was now obsolete, thanks to the work of the green paladins.

Ahead, boots clomped on the metal floor. Akira’s first instinct was to fight, and it took a tremendous effort to hold himself back, instead ducking into a side room with Jeya and Imelda. Imelda remained with Akira at the door, listening to the guard’s progress, while Jeya stepped back, pulling up the blueprints Pidge had given them ahead of time.

“There’s a fifty-fifty chance that patrol continues on to the control room,” Jeya muttered once the footsteps had passed. “And if it does, we might be in for trouble.”

“Better pick up the pace, then,” Akira said. He opened the door, glanced both ways down the corridor, then took off toward the cells. It was nerve-wracking, infiltrating a base this small. Any corner might bring him face-to-face with a guard or sentry, and six months of training and ever-more-frequent battles hadn’t completely shaken the corner of his mind that shied away from violent confrontations.

 _Get to the prisoners,_ he told himself. He just had to keep this quiet until they had control of the cell block, so the guards didn’t decide to take their frustrations out on the prisoners. After that, all bets were off.

There were two guards outside the cell block. Akira fired before he had time to think about it.

His shot missed by inches, and the guard ducked, swinging his rifle around as Imelda took cover around the corner. Akira should follow her. He knew he should, but he was here in a Galra prison, ten feet from cells like the one Takashi had been held in. Like the ones Matt and Val and Layeni had been held in.

Akira squared up, steadying his pistol with his off hand and taking aim as the guards opened fire. Lasers flashed through the fringes of his vision; a line of liquid fire opened up along his upper arm. Akira ignored it all and took the shot, feeling a twist of satisfaction as first one guard then the other dropped.

Imelda leaned around the corner, took in the downed guards, then joined Akira in the open. She glanced at his arm—one of the lasers had seared his armor, and though it hadn’t broken through, he suspected he would find at least a second degree burn when this was over.

Thankfully, Imelda made no comment on the wound. If she disapproved of Akira’s chosen tactics, she didn’t let it show, and the three of them hurried toward the door, where Jeya dropped into a crouch as she popped the front panel off the door lock and stripped a few wires.

“We’re here,” Akira said. “Two guards down. Going in for the prisoners now. Standby for extraction.”

Jordan barked an acknowledgment, and then Jeya had the door open. Akira steeled himself, then strode into the cell block, trying not to imagine Takashi’s face on the emaciated figures staring back at him.

* * *

All was quiet for two days after Rolo’s stunt in the lab. Sam remained tight-lipped about his concerns, but he couldn’t help but worry. It was a dangerous game they played, and they knew very little about their opponents. One miscalculation, and it could all be over.

In all likelihood, Sam was overreacting. It wasn’t as though the druids took Rolo every day—just nearly so. Something else occasionally demanded their attention. New test subjects, perhaps, or preparations for the next experiment, or meetings with whoever oversaw this whole operation.

That was probably all this was, as Rolo was quick to point out. “I don’t get a lot of vacation in this vrekking place,” he’d said, an easy smile on his face as he dozed with his head on Sam’s thigh. “I’ll take what I can get.”

He was nervous, and only growing more so. He hid it well, at first, but when the third day dawned without a peep from the druids, even Rolo couldn’t pretend his mind wasn’t supplying him with every horrendous possibility.

When Sam finally heard the familiar cadence of approaching footsteps, he was almost relieved, in a perverse sort of way.

“Damn,” Rolo muttered, one tension releasing, only to be replaced by a different sort. “Guess it really was too good to be true.”

Sam squeezed his arm as he helped him sit up. The guards rarely came to check on their prisoners, and Sam was more certain now than ever that their cell wasn’t being watched. It seemed the druids didn’t care what Sam and Rolo did outside of the lab, but Sam wasn’t going to take that risk. Being consigned to separate cells was a small punishment, as these things went, considering Sam and Rolo could always find each other by stepping out of their bodies, but Sam had spent the better part of a year deprived of physical contact that wasn’t painful. He didn’t want Rolo to have to adapt to that.

“Just breathe,” Sam whispered, trying to impart a little bit of courage. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

Rolo smiled, but the expression fell flat. Sam wanted desperately to hug him, to protect him from the endless experiments--bodily, if need be. He knew how that would end, though, and he didn’t need Rolo worrying about _him_ on top of everything else.

The lock turned with a hollow _thunk_ , and the moderately brighter lights of the corridor cut a wide swath across the cell. Sam released Rolo’s arm quickly, albeit reluctantly, and retreated to the back of the cell. The guards didn’t like anything that looked like an attempt to interfere.

But the guards didn’t grab Rolo. They parted around him, and Sam couldn’t process what that might mean until they converged on him, rough gloved hands closing around his arms and hauling him to his feet.

Him. _Sam._ They hadn’t dragged Sam out of this cell in months. They’d barely acknowledged his presence since Rolo arrived, except to feed him.

Why the sudden change?

“No!” Rolo cried, struggling upright. He was still unsteady on the crude prosthetic the Galra had given him, but he latched onto the nearer guard’s arm and hauled himself upright, lips pulling back in a snarl. “Leave him alone. I’m your godsdamned test subject, okay? Take me!”

Sam opened his mouth to tell Rolo not to worry about him, but the guard didn’t wait that long. He grabbed the metal baton hanging at his waist and brought it down on Rolo’s wrist with a sickening crunch. Sam’s blood ran cold as Rolo howled, dropping to the ground and curling around his hand.

“Vrekt,” the other guard muttered, a cold, cruel amusement suffusing his voice. “What’s Gorvek doing to him in there? You’d think he’d be happy to get a break from her attention.”

Rolo growled, the sound low enough it might almost be mistaken for a whimper of pain. Neither of the guards paid it any mind, but Sam twisted as they marched him toward the door, catching Rolo’s eye before the lad did anything he couldn’t take back.

 _Don’t,_ Sam thought, willing Rolo to understand. _It’s not worth it._

Rolo’s scarcely-contained rage didn’t lessen, but he stayed on the ground, silent and unmoving until the cell door closed between them.

* * *

Alarms began to blare not long after Akira’s team entered the cell block. From her position in the command room, Ryner was able to track the guards’ response.

“I count ten Galra,” she said. “I’ve triggered a reboot in the sentries’ system, so you’ll have about five minutes before they get in on this. Other security systems are still down.”

“All right,” Akira said. “It’s going to take a minute or two to get all these cells open and check over the prisoners, so let us know if anything changes. Jordan--”

“Already headed your way,” Jordan said. “We’ll handle the guards.”

A prompt appeared on one of the other screens, and Ryner tore her eyes off the security footage long enough to read it. Somebody was trying to restart the riot suppression systems. Doing so with the cell doors open would flood the cell block with a gaseous irritant, something Pidge had compared to tear gas. The Guard uniforms could be sealed against the gas, but the prisoners would likely be rendered helpless, and six Guardsmen couldn’t get them all to the ships alone.

“Pidge,” Ryner barked, diverting her focus to the riot suppression system, throwing more authorization requests and workarounds into the mix to slow the Galra’s progress. “Status?”

Pidge made a noncommittal noise, and Ryner glanced over her shoulder to where they’d set up at the last terminal in the row. They’d hooked up to the terminal, and one screen showed a progress bar slowly creeping toward one hundred percent.

Pidge, though, had turned to another station, red lights washing their face in soft shadow as files flashed by on the screen.

“Pidge.”

Pidge blinked and looked up at Ryner for a second before she had to return to her own problems. “Sorry, what?”

“Progress. We may need to pull out soon. Do you have the files you need?”

“Not yet,” Pidge said. “It doesn’t look like Dad’s here, though. I’m trying to find the archived prisoner data, see if they transferred him—it’s looking like they don’t keep people here for very long, for all it’s a ‘high security holding facility.’”

They scoffed, and Ryner opened her mouth to ask if this was _really_ the best time to analyze the data, but motion on the security feeds drew her attention.

“First wave of guards is almost to the cell block,” she warned. “ETA thirty seconds.”

“On it,” Jordan barked. Ryner glanced to another feed. Jeya was onto the seventh cell door, Akira and Imelda checking over the prisoners and gathering them in the open space at the center of the cell block. Outside, Ivka and Henrok, dressed in their stolen uniforms, converged with the four other guards who had come to investigate the breach. Ryner watched the suspicion creep in.

The first guard lowered the barrel of their rifle, but before they could get off a shot, Ivka and Henrok struck. Ivka took down the suspicious guard with a single clean shot, while Henrok swung his rifle hard enough to dent a second’s helmet. Jordan appeared around the last corner, swiftly dropping the last two. They went down clutching at wounds, and Henrok brought the butt of his rifle down on their helmets until they went still.

“That won’t have gone unnoticed,” Ivka muttered, adjusting her grip on her gun. “How much longer on the sentries’ reboot protocol?”

“Under a minute,” Ryner said. “Looks like the last few guards are headed for the fighters. They’re going to try to catch you on the way out.”

Inside the cell block, Akira stilled for a moment, then went back to splinting a prisoner’s leg with an emergency med kit. “Good,” he said. “That’s one less thing we have to worry about right now.”

Ivka and Henrok exchanged looks, but said nothing. Akira obviously didn’t want to worry the prisoners, and Ryner was inclined to agree with him. She put one last delay on the riot suppressants as Jeya opened the final door and Akira got the freed prisoners moving in the right direction, Jordan’s team leading the way back to the airlock where they’d parked their shuttle.

Once they were moving, Ryner turned back to Pidge. “They’re going to need us out there to cover them,” she said.

“Yeah.” Pidge bit their lip, not looking up from the second screen. “Just give me a sec. Almost done.”

Ryner’s eyes darted to the file transfer, which blinked to indicate the process was complete. “Pidge--”

She didn’t get a chance to finish her sentence as a single laser blast lit up the room. Heat and pain erupted in Ryner’s side, and she collapsed, the crack of her helmet against the console ringing loud in her ears.

* * *

“ _Ryner!_ ”

Akira froze, all thoughts of the mission flying from his head at the panic in Pidge’s voice. He heard the hum of their bayard, overlapping shouts, another laser burst. Then only breathing, and a soft, pained moan.

“Ryner?” Pidge whispered. “Shit. Ryner, are you okay?”

“Pidge, what happened?” Akira demanded. The other Guardsmen were looking at him; the prisoners, too. Akira turned away from their unasked questions, all his focus bent toward Pidge. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Pidge said, voice wavering. “One of the guards woke up. She shot Ryner.”

Ryner’s breath hitched, and Pidge trailed off into half-formed sounds of encouragement. “I’ll live,” Ryner said, and Akira breathed a sign of relief—at least until she continued. “I’m not sure if I can walk, though. My leg’s hit, and--”

She cut off with a hiss of pain.

“That looks bad,” Pidge whispered. “I’m not… I can’t move you on my own.”

The uncertainty in their voice was all Akira needed to make his decision. He turned, catching Jordan’s eyes over the huddle of prisoners between them. “Get them out,” he said simply, then turned and sprinted down a side passage, calling up the map of the base. The command room was out of the way by design, impossible to reach without crossing half the base.

“Hang on!” Jeya called over the comms. “The sentries are going to be back online any second now. Shouldn’t someone go with him?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Akira said. He held his pistol in one hand; the other reached for the long, slender Altean knife he wore at his side for emergencies. “Focus on the prisoners, and don’t wait for me.”

“But--”

“That’s an order, Jeya.” Akira rounded a corner to find three sentries waiting for him, and whatever response Jeya might have given was lost in the sudden cacophony of laserfire. Akira closed the distance, firing indiscriminately; he’d learned from experience that the robots were far more effective at a distance. Get inside their guard and you could usually dispatch them before they figured out how to deal with a target they couldn’t shoot.

One sentry went down with a shot to the chest as Akira closed the distance. He cut off another’s hand and pivoted around it, shoving it into its friend, then shot them both as they fell, waiting a beat to make sure neither of them was going to pick itself up before he continued on his way.

There was laserfire on the other end of the comms, and Akira picked up his pace, adjusting his grip on his knife.

“Hold on Pidge,” he said. “I’m almost there.”

* * *

Pidge crouched in front of Ryner, bayard at the ready. They’d managed to help her into the corner beside the door, which was stuck a few inches open, sentries clawing at the opening in an attempt to force their way in. Even getting Ryner out of the line of fire had left her breathing hard, her face ashen with the pain, and Pidge hadn’t been much help. They didn’t have the leverage to take the weight off her injured leg, and dragging her only went so far.

A sentry’s arm forced its way through the narrow gap, clawing around the edges of the door in search of the controls. Pidge had already fried them, of course, but that was a temporary solution at best. Galra robots could throw opponents without batting an eye. Once they got their shit together, they would have no problem forcing a simple door.

Anxiety twisted in Pidge’s gut as they shot a look at the computer terminal where they’d been working. Their armor didn’t have enough memory to download the base’s entire archive like they’d wanted to, so they’d had to transfer it to an external hard drive.

A hard drive that was still hooked up to the console where Pidge had left it in their rush to finish the officer who had shot Ryner.

“Akira?” they asked, hating how small their voice sounded.

“I’m here. You doing okay?”

Akira had switched over to a private frequency, for which Pidge was grateful. They didn’t need the Guard to hear them like this—one of the famed paladins of Voltron, acting like a scared child.

They scowled, injecting steel into their voice. “I’m fine. How close are you?”

“Twenty seconds.”

Pidge nodded. “Good enough.”

“Good e—What does _that_ mean? Pidge!”

They ignored him, as they ignored Ryner’s hand on their arm. Dismissing their bayard, they activated their shield and gathered their strength for a dash. Ten feet to the computer, unplug, shove the hard drive in the storage slot on their armor, dive for cover. Easy.

The lasers started flying as soon as they were out in the open, and they grunted as the blasts hit their shield, threatening to send them sprawling. Pidge gritted their teeth and kept moving, bringing up their other arm to steady their shield.

Once they reached the computer, they dropped to one knee, wedging their shield against the floor and console as they yanked the cable out of the computer and fumbled with the hard drive until they had it safely tucked away.

Akira roared, close enough now that Pidge heard his voice through the press of metal bodies, and the flood of laserfire slackened at once. Pidge summoned their bayard, slammed their fist down on the console to override the door lock, and charged out into the fray.

Akira was a whirlwind in the center of it all, firing at any sentry that stood still long enough and warding the rest off with his knife. His Guard armor—sleek black with the same aquamarine accent lights as the paladin armor and a pale orange sigil on the chest—didn’t show burns well, but he stumbled once as a laser caught him in the shoulder, and Pidge suspected that hadn’t been the first time he got hit.

After that, Pidge shut off their brain. They hadn’t gotten a good count of the sentries blocking them in—at least seven, maybe as many as twelve—but they went down one by one, bleeding sparks and synthetic Quintessence. Pidge had punched through the crowd to reach Akira, whose solid presence at their back was an unexpected comfort.

He remained alert for a few seconds after the last sentry dropped, his heavy breathing echoing off the walls. He breathed out, the tension leaking out of him, and sheathed his knife as he turned and pulled Pidge into a hug.

“You good?”

“I just rained lightning and retribution on my enemies,” they said, forcing a wry smile. “I’m better than good.”

Akira grinned, rattling their helmet with one hand as he hurried into the control room. He spoke briefly with Ryner, then reappeared with her arm slung over his shoulder. He’d holstered his gun to support her, but Ryner had one pistol active. Her grip was weak, but it was one more line of defense against whatever they ran into on the way out.

“Ready?” Akira asked.

Pidge raised bayard and shield, then charged ahead, every sense on alert for signs of trouble. They were all too aware how much Ryner and Akira were counting on them right now. If they missed something—if they got distracted again…

They met two more waves of sentries on their way back to Green, both smaller than the group that had assaulted the command room. Pidge took out the first before Akira and Ryner rounded the corner, and Ryner only had to shoot one from the second squad.

Green roared as Pidge approached, the sound bolstering them, and they whooped as they rounded the corner to find the maintenance hatch through which they’d entered. Pidge sealed their helmet, taking up post at the door as Akira kicked the door release and helped Ryner out through the hatch into Green’s waiting maw.

Pidge followed, tearing past Akira and Ryner as they headed for the cockpit. They’d already switched back to the main comms frequency, so they knew the Guard shuttle had just launched. Half a dozen Galra fighters were in the air—these more heavily armed than the standard models, but still no match for a lion. Pidge tore through them in a matter of seconds, smiling to themself as lasers skimmed harmlessly off Green’s shields.

“Report,” Akira said, joining Pidge in the cockpit. He was carrying Ryner outright now, her eyes squeezed shut as she leaned against his shoulder. Pidge’s stomach clenched. “Any casualties?”

“Bumps and bruises from the warm welcome,” Ivka said. “Nothing more serious than that.”

Akira breathed in, nodding to himself. “Glad to hear it. Pidge, you want to do the honors?”

“Gladly,” they said, swinging Green around and unleashing everything they had on the prison. It looked so unassuming from the outside—just a small gray bunker stuck on the side of an asteroid. It crumpled under their onslaught, reduced to rubble in a matter of seconds.

“Good riddance,” Jeya muttered.

Pidge agreed with every fiber of their being. “Opening a wormhole now,” they said. “Let’s get these people home.”

* * *

“Please tell me I’m not the only one who thinks Prorok is a complete hack.”

“A what?”

Meri glanced up from her holopad to find Dez frowning at her, ears cocked in confusion. “Right.” Meri heaved a sigh and clicked over to another file. “Sorry, idioms. Uh...” She paused, momentarily distracted by the quivering of her ears. Funny how they seemed to have a mind of their own.

It had taken months, but she’d managed to ambush Sergeant Nahra as the woman headed toward her new post on Commander Varroh’s ship. Very few people there knew who Nahra was, and even fewer had met her in person, so Meri had been able to more or less invent her own cover identity—allowing, of course, for a few stumbles over military procedure that Nahra really should have known. (But hey, she was a nobody from a dead-end assignment who’d just bribed her way to the heart of the fleet. She was bound to be a little off.)

A few more months, and Meri had secured a promotion and a transfer to the _Sentry_ , Commander Prorok’s ship, where Dez was stationed.

All told, Meri had only known the woman for about a month, and she’d only known Meri’s true identity for about a week.

 _That_ had been a fun conversation. Meri had watched and waited for a few days, trying to get a feel for the woman, before approaching her in the commissary and flashing Thace’s dagger. Dez’s eyes had gone wide, and she’d slammed Meri back against the wall, lip pulling back in a threat. Meri had seriously thought Dez was going to take her head off for a moment, and even once they were somewhere private, it had taken the knife, a demonstration of Thace’s ciphers, and namedropping both Keena _and_ Keith before Dez accepted her as an ally.

In all honesty, Meri had been about two seconds from just releasing her shift and asking how many Alteans there were in Zarkon’s army.

Probably better that it hadn’t come to that.

Hell, when Meri finally got a chance to go back to her usual body, it was going to take some doing. After a few days, she acclimated to a shift, and it was hard to get out of that rut. Even back on Earth, Meri had sometimes forgotten how to be Altean again.

“What I meant to say was I don’t get how Prorok got to be a commander in Zarkon’s army,” Meri said. “His idea of security is asking if he can trust you—then asking again, I guess in case you lied the first time?”

Dez snorted, swiping her finger across her screen. “Oh, he’s an imbecile. Occasionally stumbles onto the right answer, though, so don’t let your guard down. Thace ever tell you how he almost got executed for somebody else’s treason?”

“What?” Meri laughed. “ _No._ ”

Dez grinned. “I had a hell of a time clearing his name, too. Remind me to tell you about it when we’re done with these files.”

Meri wrinkled her nose, closing out of her current directory and going back to the next set. For the most part, spying was basically what she’d done for the last five years. Lots of hanging around, pretending to be part of the crowd so you could overhear a juicy piece of news. Occasionally getting your hands on a computer and pulling as many files as you could before you split.

Then a long, boring slog through those files when you got home.

It was more pleasant when she could go to Dez with her intel, as she was now. One of Prorok’s other commanders, a little brat named Vit, had just received a special assignment, and Meri—well, Nahra—was stepping up to assume his duties, one of which was coordinating with Dez on station security. They were here, ostensibly, to catch Nahra up on security protocols.

In reality, they were combing Prorok’s records for references to Project Vindication.

It was like searching for whispers of the Blue Lion back at the Garrison. There was something there, to be sure, but Meri had never been able to tell how much Iverson and his men actually knew. If she hadn’t been a paladin to begin with, she would have been totally lost.

“I don’t think we’re going to find anything here,” Meri said at length, scrolling through the last half of an expense report without reading any of it. “If this is one of Haggar’s pet projects, she’s not gonna go blabbing about it to every commander in the army.”

“Probably not,” Dez said. “But unless you have a lead, we don’t know where else to look.”

That was true, unfortunately, and Meri glared at her holopad for a long moment before relenting and pulling up another file. “What do you think it is?”

“A weapon.”

“That’s not very specific.”

Dez shrugged. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned doing this job, it’s that I can never come up with something as sick as what goes on inside that witch’s head. The fact that it’s top secret makes me think it’s not your usual energy weapons.”

Meri hummed. “Something closer to the robeasts, then?”

“Maybe. Maybe some kind of druid magic. Maybe something so horrific no one else could even… huh.”

Meri lifted her head, nerves screaming at the uneasy look on Dez’s face. “Find something?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe.” Dez tapped the screen, then handed her pad across the desk to Meri. “What do you think?”

Meri skimmed the file Dez had called up, brow furrowed. “Recalling the druids?” she whispered. “That can’t mean anything good.”

“Keep reading.”

Meri did so, her lungs tightening with every line. It seemed Haggar had recently ordered more than half of her druids back to the heart of Zarkon’s power. Nearly every druid stationed on the warships had been called, along with roughly a quarter of those stationed at research outposts and munitions factories around the empire. This missive had been prepared, it seemed, to quell complaints from Zarkon’s commanders.

Haggar gave no explanation for the orders, except for a single line near the end of the message.

_Your immediate compliance is required, that Lord Zarkon might attain vindication and retribution against those who seek to unseat him. Vrepit sa._

“Vindication and retribution?” Meri whispered. The Galran alphabet didn't have cases, so Meri couldn’t be certain whether the phrase was regular Imperial rhetoric or if it was naming Haggar’s latest projects, but she had a feeling caution was prudent. Especially since the missive was dated less than two weeks after the battle for Earth.

“Like I said, it could be nothing,” Dez offered, reaching for her flask and taking a swig.

Meri’s ears swiveled, trembling as they lay back against her scalp. “Either that, or we have two new nightmares to worry about.” She set the holopad on the desk and slid it back toward Dez. “Let’s finish going through the files we have now.” She would start her search for Project Retribution tomorrow.

* * *

Sam was already halfway out of his body by the time he reached the lab. Months without leaving the cell except in his mind, months without the drugs that made his thoughts hazy for hours after the fact, without the bright lights and pricking needles and endless tests.

He’d always known something more was coming, but on some level he’d thought he was done with this.

The exam table was cold beneath his back, but Sam barely felt it. He closed his eyes against the glare of the overhead lights and focused on his breathing. Rolo would be here, waiting for him as Sam had always waited for Rolo, and Sam couldn’t let him see how scared he was. He needed Sam to be strong.

So he breathed, letting the guards strap him down and position him inside the contraption that severed him from his body. He tried to hold himself in until they started, afraid that they might be able to measure the moment he stepped outside himself. He couldn’t give them anything, not a single inch more leverage than they already had.

The machine finally powered on, and the first faint tug ripped Sam out of his body.

“I gotcha,” Rolo whispered, catching him as he scattered. Sam’s thoughts refused to fall in line for a long moment; he’d forgotten how jarring the experience was when he wasn’t the one in control. He looked down at himself—not seeing so much as sensing—and realized he held only a hazy shape, his image colorless and translucent. Rolo’s hands sunk into Sam’s Quintessence, holding him together through stubbornness and raw fury.

Sam focused on Rolo’s breath, tracing the rhythm of his words and the tone of his voice (anger, fear, and guilt swirling together in a dissonant spiral) until the world again began to make sense.

“I’m fine,” Sam said, forcing himself into a solid form. He straightened, lifting a hand to grasp Rolo’s arm.

“Bullshit,” Rolo said. “You shouldn’t—It should be me on that table.”

Rolo’s gaze drifted past Sam’s shoulder to the exam table. Sam resisted the urge to look. He’d seen this scene often enough before; he didn’t need to see it again. “We knew this would happen, Rolo,” Sam said, straining to keep his voice level. “We knew they weren’t done with me yet.”

Rolo was shaking, helpless rage gathering beneath his skin, and he finally tore his gaze away from Sam’s body. “ _Why?_ ”

“I don’t know, son,” Sam said. “That’s why we’ve got to take advantage of this opportunity as long as we have it.”

Frowning, Rolo stepped back. “Opportunity?”

“It took me months to be able to come this far from the cell,” Sam said. “I still can’t go much beyond here, and you--”

“Probably won’t be able to stay here much longer,” Rolo said, lips tight. It must have been a strain to be here at all; they usually waited until the druids took Rolo to go poking around in the Galra systems, since it took so much out of Rolo to get here that he couldn’t manage much else. “So what?”

Sam offered a crooked smile, gesturing to the far wall of the lab. “There’s more beyond those walls we haven’t seen. Other labs, empty cells—you said it looked like a full base, even if they aren’t using all of it. And now they’ve brought me here, given me a new anchor point.”

“You want to go exploring.”

Sam shrugged. “It’s the first chance I’ve had since I figured out what I was doing, and there’s no telling how many more chances I’m going to get.”

Rolo nodded slowly, his brow furrowed. “You’re right. Just—be careful.”

“I will be. You should head back. No need to strain yourself for no reason.”

“No reason?” Rolo crossed his arms. “Hey, old man. You kept watch over me for a good long while when I was still figuring this whole thing out. It’s about time I returned the favor.”

“But--”

Rolo held up a hand. “I won’t do anything this time. I just want to know what they’re doing. Can’t fight what you don’t know.”

Part of Sam wanted to argue, but Rolo had a point. They needed all the information they could find, and Sam couldn’t exactly be here to watch while he was out roaming the lab. He forced a smile, tired though he felt, and patted Rolo’s shoulder. “All right. Good training, I guess.”

“Hey. I gotta push myself, or I’ll never get anywhere.”

Sam caught his eyes drifting toward the exam table. He stopped himself, then turned and passed through the wall and into the corridor beyond.

Moving in this state wasn’t as simple as walking. He could go through the motions, when he focused himself into an approximation of his physical form, and for the most part that was what he ended up doing. It was easier to not think about the fact that he had no substance and to let his instincts take over.

But it was faster to ignore all semblance of a body and… drift. He moved where he willed himself to move, as quickly as he wanted to move. It was something between a glide and outright teleportation, albeit limited to his own understanding of the space he occupied. He couldn’t simply appear somewhere without the risk of appearing in the wrong spot entirely. By now he could jump from the cell to the lab and back again, as the months had worn their relative locations into his mind.

For this, though, he had to take it slowly, passing from room to room and building a mental map of the base. Most of the rooms he entered were empty, some set up with equipment Sam didn’t recognize that he could only assume were for other experiments. He found the guards’ quarters—a third of them occupied, along with the lounge at the end of the hall. He found a cafeteria of sorts—quiet now except for a robot of a different style from the sentries, which was scrubbing dishes in the back.

There were other cells, too, many of them bearing signs of recent occupation. How recent, he couldn’t say, but traces of Quintessence lingered in the walls and the bloodstains on the floor. He saw only a handful of prisoners, all of them hollow shells that stared at nothing.

Had Sam been like that, before Rolo came? It was so hard to remember those lonely months. He didn’t think he had ever been this bad, though. Listless and ill, yes, but these poor souls were different, like they had one foot into the next life and were just waiting for the rest of themself to catch up. He might have thought they were androids if not for the shallow rise and fall of their chests.

Sam didn’t linger here, where the hollow gazes twisted knots in his stomach. There was no way to be sure, of course, but he couldn’t help feeling like these were people whose souls had left their body and vanished into the ether, much as Sam had nearly lost himself on more than one excursion.

Minutes passed as Sam explored; perhaps as much as an hour. It was difficult to track time when he was like this, especially without living creatures to mark his speed against. The electronics in the wall snagged his mind as he passed, and it was anyone’s guess whether he lost himself in them or whether it only felt as though those momentary encounters dragged on for hours.

One thing was clear: this base was far larger than could be explained by the experiments they were running on Sam and Rolo. Sam was more sure now than ever that they were the only subjects of this particular research--the only to have survived, anyway--and there didn’t seem to be many other major studies ongoing. The extra space suggested there had once been more activity here, or perhaps they were preparing to expand the study. Perhaps both.

Sam had begun to think he would find nothing of use in the rest of the lab—not the part of it he could reach, anyway. He was nearing the limits of his range, but he’d found the outer walls in only one direction, which had at least confirmed that they were on a moon or planet of some sort, barren rock stretching out to the horizon, crystal clear stars overhead.

Still Sam kept searching. There had to be something here he could use. Other prisoners he might be able to contact. A communications hub where he might call for help, or a hangar where he could steal a ship, provided he ever found a way to get himself and Rolo out of the cell without guards breathing down their neck.

The corridors changed. Far from the raw stone of the cells where he and Rolo were kept, far from the cramped metal and glaring lights of the rest of the lab; here the ceilings soared and the walls expanded enough that Sam could have driven a truck through these passages. The lighting dimmed, but instead of infrequent lamps it came from strips running along both walls, creating a much more even field of illumination.

There were no doors here; not for a long stretch of cavernous corridor, and when Sam passed through one wall he found himself following a spur out from the main body of the lab to a smaller dome.

The dome was just beyond Sam’s range, but there was something about it—something that made his stomach churn and his skin tingle like the air was full of static. He pushed, gathering his will into a tight ball that he forced outward inch by inch until he reached the airlock at the nearest side of the outlying dome. The wall here felt more solid than others in the lab, though Sam couldn’t say if that was how far he was stretching himself or if this place was actually somehow warded against Quintessence. He pushed, gritting his teeth, and the metal yielded beneath his touch, reluctantly at first and then in a sudden rush.

He tumbled into the open space within the dome and was instantly overcome by a deep, churning nausea. He stumbled, vision fading out, and automatically reached out to steady himself on the wall. He faded halfway through it before he caught himself, and dragged his eyes up to the hulking machine that took up the bulk of the room. He'd never seen anything remotely like it--hundreds of yards of twisted metal spilling cords and gears and veins of sickly purple Quintessence--but he recognized it at once from the descriptions he'd seen in the lab's files, as well as from Rolo's stories.

A robeast shell.

Sam's vision fuzzed as he looked at it, the cavernous room spinning around him as something within the unfinished robeast called out to him, drawing him forward.

It must have been a fever dream, or the effects of straying too far from his body. What he saw, rising from the robeast like an eldritch abomination, barely had physical form. It writhed and bled toward him, a mass of tentacles the color of algae that pulsed in time with the flow of Quintessence through its guts.

Something in the mass shifted, turning its attention toward Sam, and for a moment, he forgot himself. There was a rage in that presence, and pain so strong it floored Sam. It hooked something inside him, threatening to consume him—until all at once it was too much. Something gave, and Sam plunged into darkness.

* * *

Pidge sat on the floor of the pod room, their back against Ryner’s cryopod. Their laptop sat on the ground before them, complete with all the files they’d pulled from the prison’s computer, but they hadn’t touched any of it yet. Instead, they held a portable comms unit in their lap, their mother’s face projected above their knees.

“She’s going to be fine, Pidge.”

Pidge huffed, biting at their fingernail. “Yeah, I _know_. Coran said the same thing. But there’s always a chance, isn’t there? Maybe the laser hit a nerve or something. Maybe she’s always going to have trouble walking, and it’ll be my fault.”

“Pidge...”

“She tried to get me to focus, you know. But I was too busy looking for Dad, cause ten minutes would have made all the difference, right?” Pidge huffed out a laugh. They hugged their knees to their chest, letting the comms unit dangle from a limp hand. “I should have just paid attention to the damn mission instead of letting Ryner get shot.”

“You didn’t _let_ anything happen, Pidge,” Karen said. “You know Ryner’s going to say the same thing when she gets out. And she’ll be _fine._ ”

“You don’t know that!”

Karen arched an eyebrow. “Actually, I do. The adjunct bond, remember?”

Pidge’s lips parted, and they flushed, feeling suddenly foolish for having forgotten about that. Their mother would have felt the danger of today’s mission, would have likely known Ryner was injured and how badly.

Pidge settled their chin between their knees and sighed. “I screwed up today, Mom. I just… I want to find Dad so much. I hate not knowing what happened to him.”

“I know,” Karen said. She leaned back, giving Pidge a better view of the room she was in. She’d been working when Pidge called—probably trying to finish up the treaty before the summit in a few days—but she’d dropped everything as soon as she saw Pidge’s face. “And, okay, maybe you didn’t do everything exactly right. You know better for next time.”

Pidge made a face. “Keith’s mom teach you that?”

“Actually, Keena’s philosophy is to not make mistakes, because you’re never guaranteed a second chance.”

Snorting, Pidge sagged back against the cryopod. When they tilted their head back, they could make out a distorted view of Ryner. Coran had said she’d only need a few hours in the pod, and Hunk had been excited to try something new for dinner, or so he said. Pidge was ninety percent sure he was just trying to guilt them into showing up.

Well, they’d gone, and now they were back here, too restless to focus on the files they’d pulled, too sick with guilt to forget what had happened.

“Did you… find anything?” Karen asked haltingly. “Obviously he wasn’t there when you arrived, or you’d have already said something. But… any clues?”

She was trying not to show how much she wanted Pidge to say yes. It was obvious, but Pidge appreciated that she was at least trying to hold back. Unfortunately, Pidge had no good news to offer. At least, not yet.

“I… I haven’t actually looked,” they admitted. “Every time I try I think about how that’s what got Ryner hurt. I figured I’d wait for her to come out of the pod so I can apologize, and then I’ll start looking.”

Karen smiled sadly. “Take your time, sweetheart. Those files aren’t going anywhere.”

“Yeah.” Pidge hesitated, taking in the dark circles under their mother’s eyes. She’d been working hard on this treaty for weeks now, interspersed—apparently—with training sessions with Keith’s mom. Pidge doubted she had meant to let that slip, and she’d remained tight lipped about how and _why_ it was happening, but that was a fact they’d had to come to terms with.

Really, Karen didn’t need to waste any more time on Pidge’s directionless guilt.

“I’m gonna try to get a start on this now, actually,” they said, lifting their head and forcing a smile. “No point in putting it off, right?”

Karen’s smile was considerably more relaxed than Pidge’s, and that made them feel the tiniest bit guilty. “Of course. Don’t stay up too late.”

Pidge rolled their eyes. “Mom. It’s _space._ Late is a relative term.”

Karen chuckled, but wished them a good night before signing off with one last _I love you._

Once the comms disconnected, Pidge sagged, letting the unit fall to the floor. Their eyes drifted to their laptop, and they pulled it over, something nameless inside them resisting even that small action. They’d put the search for their father above Ryner’s safety today; they didn’t deserve to get their answers while she was still in the pod.

They got as far as the directory of files they’d pulled before they stalled again, cursor hovering over the archived prisoner records. All they had to do was click and do a couple quick searches, and they’d have their answer one way or another. Either their dad had been here, or he hadn’t.

One way to find out.

They groaned and flopped backward, their laptop slipping sideways off their crossed legs.

“That doesn’t look like good news.”

Pidge lifted their head, then let it drop again when they saw that it was only Shiro. “No, I just can’t make myself look.”

Shiro hummed, sitting down next to them and leaning back on his hands. “Agonizing over it isn’t going to help, you know.”

“It’s not _that_ ,” Pidge said. “I just--”

“Feel bad about Ryner?”

Pidge shut their mouth with a snap, flushing to the roots of their hair. “No.”

Shiro smiled, closing his eyes against the lights of the pod room like he was on a beach sunbathing. “Good. You shouldn’t.”

Somehow, Pidge felt like they’d walked straight into that one. They huffed, dragging themself upright and pulling their computer close again. “It just feels weird to act like nothing happened.”

“Not to sound callous, but you can’t drop everything every time someone gets hurt.” Shiro place a hand atop their head, offering a smile. “You’re already here, which means you’ll be here as soon as she gets out. There’s no reason not to be productive in the meantime.”

“I guess...” Pidge stared at the screen, still skeptical, then double clicked the file. They started their standard search, then sat back, heart pounding. “It’s not like I’m going to find anything, anyway. I’m starting to think he never made it to a prison at all.”

Shiro tensed, and Pidge immediately wished they could take back their words.

“Your dad’s stronger than you realize, Pidge.” Shiro’s hand slipped from their head to loop around their shoulders, pulling them into a one-armed hug. “And he’s smarter than Zarkon could have expected. If he’s not in one of these prisons, it’s because he’s already escaped and is giving the Empire hell all on his own.”

Pidge’s lips twitched into a smile, and they relaxed into the hug, watching numbers scroll by on the screen. “All alone?” They scoffed. “Please. He’s probably gathered an entire armada to kick Zarkon’s ass.”

Shiro laughed, the sound bright enough to chase away some of Pidge’s gloom. “You’re right. He’d adopted half the Garrison by the time we left for Kerberos. Don’t see why it would be any different out here.”

“Right? He’s probably shared all sorts of embarrassing stories about me. I’m gonna find him and there’ll be five hundred aliens asking me if I still try to climb up on the roof to talk to the squirrels.”

Shiro grinned. “ _Do_ you still do that?”

They jabbed their elbow into his side and he flinched away, holding up his hands in surrender. “On the bright side, they’ll all have heard your brother’s embarrassing stories, too.”

“I hope I get to see Matt’s face when he realizes.”

The text on Pidge’s laptop screen stopped scrolling, and a dialogue box popped up with the results of the search. They froze, almost afraid to touch the laptop. They’d seen the same message so many times they noticed that the shape of the text in the box was different before they’d had a chance to read a single word.

“Oh my god.”

They reached out, slowly at first, then yanking the laptop towards them. Their heart had lodged in their throat, and the sound that escaped was the strangled middle ground between a laugh and a sob.

_One (1) result found._

_Prisoner 119-9875: Human, Male. Origin point: 2065.234, -8246.891, -0597.206, J – Hovent Sector._

Pidge’s vision blurred, and they failed three times to click on the button to pull up the full record before they realized their hand was shaking.

“Pidge.” Shiro sounded stunned, his hand ice cold as he reached out to squeeze Pidge’s. They looked up at him, blinking furiously. “That’s--”

“It’s him,” they whispered. “We found him.”


	19. A Game of Eshet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Pidge and Ryner hit an Imperial prison, where they found their first hint of Sam's fate buried in the prisoner records. Ryner was injured in the fight, and Shiro took a break from planning the Voltron Coalition summit to keep Pidge company in the pod room. Hunk and Shay are on their way back to the castle after long, frustrating months bouncing around from planet to planet. Shiro promised to help teach Hunk diplomacy, using the summit as a learning opportunity of sorts.
> 
> Elsewhere in the universe, Sam Holt discovered an unfinished robeast shell in the lab where he and Rolo are being held; Matt, Val, and Allura are off in search of Oriande; and Keith, Lance, and Thace have been invited to talk with the resistance on the Galra homeworld.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for minor character death. For more details, including what sections to skip, [go here.](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/private/172529104449/tumblr_p6kqraudzf1ttvln6) (Spoilers, of course.) (Mobile: make sure to open the link in a browser, rather than the Tumblr app.)

“You—what?”

Matt was breathless, his face slack with shock, and Pidge hurried on before he got too far down the rabbit-hole of what-ifs. “We found a lead. On Dad.” They glanced to the other screen, where their mother was so still they thought for a moment the connection might have cut out. Then she breathed in, a sound like a sob escaping her, and pressed both hands to her mouth. “He wasn’t actually at the prison we hit—the records said they only kept him there for about two weeks—but we have the coordinates of the place he was transferred to. Someplace called TK157.”

“We don’t know much about it yet,” Shiro put in. He, like Pidge, had already changed into his armor, and he’d filled Coran in on the situation while Pidge compiled everything the castle database and Thace's records had on the area around TK157. “We’re going to do some recon tonight to see where we stand.”

“Tonight?” Karen asked. “But—the summit--”

“Isn’t for a few days,” Shiro said. “It can wait.”

Karen frowned. If she wasn’t already on a New Altean ship headed this way, she would be soon, and Pidge could only imagine how frustrating it would be to be stuck there for three days waiting to reach the edge of the defensive zone. “I thought you expected delegations to begin arriving as early as tomorrow. You gave me a whole big speech about making a good first impression.”

“Commander Holt comes first.”

Shiro’s voice was soft, but so emphatic it brought tears to Pidge’s eyes—Matt’s and their mother’s too, though the blue tint of the comms screens masked it a little. It was easy to forget that Shiro had spent years training with their dad, and months after that with him and Matt on the _Persephone_. Pidge’s dad had always said his crews were like family, so it made sense that Shiro would feel the same.

But hearing Shiro say it made it somehow more real.

“Don’t worry, Mom,” Pidge said, smiling as Shiro squeezed their shoulder. “We’re taking it one step at a time. And if this ends up running into the summit, Ryner and I will go it alone.”

Shiro’s fingers twitched. “I don’t remember agreeing to that.”

Pidge rolled their eyes. “It’s common sense, Shiro. Maybe you can get away with ditching the official welcomes— _maybe_. But they’ll need you here for the summit itself. Besides, we already know Dad won’t be at TK157.”

“What?” Matt asked. “Why not?”

Shiro sighed, but clearly he'd been thinking along the same lines as Pidge. “Because he’s too important to us.”

The words bit deep, though Pidge had thought them a hundred times in the last six months. “Zarkon and Haggar know you and Shiro are paladins,” they said to Matt. “And they know Dad was the third member of your crew. I don’t know what plans they may have had for him originally, but after the two of you escaped and started fighting back, they had to have known we'd be coming for him. And... that they can leverage him against us. They aren't going to make it easy to find him.”

Karen closed her eyes. “That makes sense.”

“It also sucks.” Matt folded his hands and leaned his forehead against them. “I should be there.”

“What you’re doing is important, too, Matt,” Shiro said. “And as much as I hate to admit it, Pidge is right. We probably won’t find him in the next couple of days. You have time to finish your search for Oriande.”

Pidge nodded. “You _know_ I’ll tell you the second I think we’ve actually found him, and you can come back then. I just wanted you both to know we’re on the right track.”

Karen nodded. “And thank god for that.”

Pidge grinned, anticipation buzzing in their chest. There was little more to be said about TK157, so they ended the call quickly—and about the time Ryner’s cycle was winding down. Pidge explained the situation hastily, promising Ryner that tonight was just recon and she should let Coran get her some dinner and then go to sleep. Pidge would catch her up in the morning so they could all formulate a plan of attack.

Ryner smiled, still a little foggy from the cryopod, and pulled them into a loose hug. “I’m happy for you, Pidge.”

They grinned, squeezed her around the waist, and blinked back tears. "Thanks, Ryner. I just hope this pans out."

"It will. Zarkon lost the second you set yourself on this trail. Now it's only a matter of time."

* * *

It took less than two hours to scout TK157, but the results were... not quite what Pidge was hoping for. Sure, TK157 wasn't much to look at--a labor colony of some sort, they guessed. Smallish and remote. No signs of robeasts or zombified aliens or other anomalies in the Quintessence readings. But the entire place was mechanized, the security systems running programs Pidge didn't even recognize. For all it looked like just another Imperial prison, it was one of the most technologically advanced places Pidge had seen—and that included Haggar’s own private command ship.

They pulled what they could from a distance and retreated to the castle, where Pidge set about analyzing their scans and teasing apart the outer layers of the security system.

“Take your time,” Shiro had said when they told him cracking TK157 was going to take a few days. His shoulders slumped with disappointment, but he managed a smile. “Better to do it right than rush in unprepared.”

He was disappointed, and everyone could tell, but he put on a happy face, and when Pidge and Ryner finally headed out the day before the official start of the summit, he slipped away from the chaos upstairs to wish them luck.

“We’ll let you know as soon as we know anything,” Pidge said. “You know we will.”

“And you know I’ll drop everything in a heartbeat if you or your dad need me.”

Pidge blinked furiously, flung themself at Shiro for one last hug, then hurried up Green’s ramp before they broke down sobbing on his fancy suit.

 _Soon,_ they thought, inputting the coordinates. _We’ll have you home soon, Dad._

* * *

“There’s no real agenda for tonight,” Shiro said to Hunk in a low voice. “At least, not officially. Some of these people have been traveling or preparing to travel all day—very few worlds have access to wormholes or comparable technology, and Coran’s been bringing people in as fast as he can for as long as I’ve been up.”

“Ouch. And he hasn’t dropped yet?” Hunk glanced to where Coran stood, swilling a flute of nunvill and smiling as he chatted with visiting dignitaries.

Shiro had to admit, he was impressed as well. He’d only been dealing with ruffled feathers (sometimes literal) for a few hours, and already he wanted to call it a night—or better yet, run off after Pidge and Ryner. The fact that Coran was still charming aliens left and right was downright superhuman.

“Probably burning Quintessence,” Shiro muttered, unable to keep a touch of bitterness from his voice. Hunk grinned at the lapse, and Shiro quickly composed himself. “Whatever his secret is, I’m glad he’s here. The talks might not start until tomorrow, but our first impression is important.”

“I thought our first impression was saving them all from Zarkon.”

Shiro snorted, knocking back the last of his nunvill. He wished saving a planet were enough to ensure people of Voltron’s good will, but he’d learned early on that that wasn’t always the case. The majority of delegations here were, in fact, favorably disposed toward the Coalition. They weren’t sure taking a stand was worth the risk, but only a small number were actively hostile.

Unfortunately, gratitude did not imply a willingness or capacity to give aid.

Shiro stared into his empty glass, contemplating a refill before shaking his head and tipping the glass toward Hunk. “That’s politics for you. Voltron is a hero, and most civilians on most of these planets are perfectly willing to help out however they can. Unfortunately, we need organized and well-funded help, and that means getting governments on board.”

“And you can’t balance a budget with a gigantic flaming sword,” Hunk said.

Shiro cracked a smile, nodded toward Hunk, then set his empty flute on one of the self-propelled trays meandering across the great hall. Coran’s staff had gone all-out in preparing for the summit, installing lights around the edges of the room that slowly changed color, projecting auroras on the wall. A new chandelier of Balmera crystal and the same pristine white metal as the bayards hung far overhead, and a quartet of unfamiliar stringed instruments played softly in one corner. Shiro didn’t recognize the music, of course, but Coran said the musicians had learned songs from nearly every world represented here tonight—just as the kitchen staff upstairs had incorporated dozens of local cuisines into the banquet, offering everyone as much comfort and consideration as they could.

No doubt Hunk would rather be upstairs working on the food, away from polite smiles and veiled insults and the truly headache-inducing dance of diplomacy. But he was here, dressed in a tailored suit of Altean design, as Shiro himself was. The design was tasteful and, thankfully, gave only a subtle nod to their paladin stations. Shiro wore a high-collared black coat and a wide cloth belt with violet embroidery, but the rest of his suit was a soft, metallic gray. Hunk’s outfit actually had more black than Shiro’s, but that only served to highlight the intricate golden designs on the cuffs, lapels, and down the back of the jacket.

Shimmery and exquisitely tailored though the suits were, they were quite reserved compared to the rest of the room. Shay, in a similarly subdued goldenrod dress, paled in comparison to Nyma, who wore an ethereal periwinkle gown that was easily a match for the outfits of even their most exquisite guests.

Moving through it all was like stepping into another reality—one without battle, or weapons, or armor. A world where people weren’t dying every day on the front lines of an ancient war, where people weren’t worked to death or starving because Zarkon’s officers hoarded all the wealth.

Allura had told him time and again that anyone coming to a summit like this was keenly aware of the statement they made with their clothes, transportation, and retinue, and that opulence was meant as a show of strength, but Shiro couldn’t help but think more favorably of those who’d opted for modest attire. At least he could be sure they weren’t wasting money their people desperately needed to rebuild their lives.

“All right,” Shiro said, clapping Hunk on the shoulder. “Best way to learn is to get your hands dirty, right?”

“Uh… I guess…?”

“Great. We’ll start easy.” Shiro scanned the crowd, his eyes sticking for a moment on the group of Cyndians listening to Akira with rapt attention. Akira, like Coran, wore the Guard’s dress uniform—something similar to, but more streamlined than, Coran's usual jumpsuit, all crisp navy lines and pale orange accents—but he moved among this crowd like he’d been born to it, drawing out laughter and hidden smiles wherever he went. His slicked-back hair and the embellishments on his uniform, reminiscent of a double-breasted suit, made him look like a Prohibition Era gentleman who’d stepped out of a speakeasy and straight into the space age.

It was somehow so _Akira_ that Shiro couldn’t even fault him for the swagger in his step.

He _could_ , however, fault him for the gleam in his eye when he caught Shiro looking and quietly directed his conversation partner’s attention Shiro’s way.

Shiro sighed, but the Cyndians were generally amenable to the strictures of the Coalition. They were flowery, ritualistic people, and they liked things to be done a certain way, but there was relatively little risk of actually scaring them off. He caught Hunk’s eye and nodded toward the approaching delegation.

“Cyndar,” he said. “Know anything about it?”

Hunk’s brow furrowed, and he scratched the back of his head. “Uh… That was the place that had the ruling class living in complete isolation, right? A whole bunch of parties and whatever while the Empire turned the rest of the planet into one big labor camp.”

“Yeah,” Shiro said, grateful the delegation was still halfway across the room. “But let’s not bring that up with them tonight. The question of guilt and of who even deserves to rule Cyndar now is incredibly complex, and it’s not something this summit is equipped to address.”

“But--”

“I know,” Shiro said. “Really I do. It’s hard to ignore problems, especially when everyone knows they’re there. But that was one of the first things Allura taught me: learn when it’s appropriate to talk about something. If we bring up the situation on Cyndar here, with dozens of other worlds present, the consul—and by extension, the rest of the nobles back home—are going to take it as a personal affront.”

Hunk was silent for a few seconds, visibly struggling with the concept. Shiro wished there was more time to talk about it—to explain that this wasn’t ignoring Cyndar’s issues, wasn’t even about deciding which issues were more important. It was about the specific reasons this summit had been called to address. Maybe in the future the working class on Cyndar would revolt, establishing their own government, and the Coalition would have to decide which was the legitimate authority. Maybe it would come to light that the ruling class had mistreated their populace both during and after the Galra occupation, and the Coalition would have to issue a condemnation.

But that was not Voltron’s job, which made it all the more vital that they give the Coalition some sure footing here and now.

“Consul Tykkar,” Shiro said, crossing his arm over his midsection and bowing his head in a formal Altean greeting. For his part, Shiro would have just as soon reverted to simple bows, but he was trying to model for Hunk, who mimicked the motion a little less gracefully at Shiro’s side. “Allow me to welcome you and yours to the Castle of Lions. I trust your accommodations are to your liking?”

Tykkar tipped his head to one side, the gesture quite dramatic considering the Cyndians’ elongated necks. “They are sufficient,” he said.

Shiro’s mood soured—the Cyndian elite had lived in opulence for several generations under Galra rule, and he couldn’t help feeling as though they were judging him at every opportunity—but he maintained his placid smile. “I’m pleased to hear it. And I hope our banquet tonight will be equally satisfactory. Allow me to introduce my companion.” He gestured Hunk forward. “Hunk Kahale of the Yellow Lion.”

Tykkar touched his fingers to his lip, eye, and ear in turn. “Glory of our ancestors be upon you, Paladin Kahale.”

“Uh--” Hunk’s eyes darted to Shiro for an instant, and Shiro lifted his hand toward his torso. “Right.” Hunk repeated the Altean greeting, bowing a little deeper this time. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Consul Tykkar.”

Shiro smiled and nodded at Hunk’s second, even more frantic look, then stepped forward once more. “Has anyone offered you a tour of the castle?”

“They have,” Tykkar said. “My staff had the foresight to arrange for an early departure, so we were among the first here. Saved ourselves the trouble of waiting through that bottleneck with the wormhole, ah?”

Shiro allowed a polite laugh. “I’m glad it all went smoothly for you. I’d love to stay and chat a while, but I’m afraid we have other duties to see to.”

Tykkar snatched a flute of something pink and foaming from a serving tray and raised it in salute. “Ah, the life of a public servant. I understand completely, of course.”

“Thank you, Consul. Perhaps we’ll have more time later in the evening.” He bowed again, then led Hunk away, angling toward the table along one wall where kitchen staff were serving drinks to visitors with special dietary restrictions. Shiro grabbed a glass of water and lifted it to his lips, ensuring they were alone before he muttered, “That man wouldn’t know the meaning of public service if it hit him on the head.”

Hunk choked on his drink. He set it down on the edge of the table, coughing, and Shiro calmly handed him a napkin, doing his level best to keep a straight face.

After a moment, Hunk snapped his head up, wide eyes boring a hole into the side of Shiro’s face. “Did you just--” Hunk paused, glanced around, and dropped his voice to a bare whisper. “Did you really just say that? _Shiro._ ” Hunk gasped dramatically, hand coming up to hide his wide grin. “That’s terrible.”

Shiro smiled, concealing it behind the rim of his glass. By the time he’d swallowed, he’d regained his composure, and he raised an eyebrow in Hunk’s direction. “Rule Zero of politics: you aren’t obligated to like anyone, or to think they’re doing the right thing, or even that they have the right motivations. You’re only obligated to not make an enemy of someone we want to, or _need_ to, work with.”

“So… wait to walk away before you insult them.” Hunk nodded solemnly. “Got it.”

Shiro spread his arms. “Hey. Gotta survive somehow. You should ask Matt and Allura how much I’ve ranted at them in the last few months. Or Akira. Akira’s had some gems of his own.” Shiro drained the last of his water, then let the mantle of sobriety settle over him once more. “Anyway, contrary to what I just demonstrated, it’s best not to do that sort of thing where people might overhear. Step away if you need to, then come rant with me at the end of the night, or talk to Shay or Lance.”

“Oh, believe me, I will.” Hunk kept pace as Shiro waded back into the sea of faces, pausing every few steps to bid another delegation welcome. He’d spent the last two weeks with Akira and Coran, quizzing each other on the names, faces, and titles of everyone they’d invited, but keeping them all straight was still an exercise in exhaustion.

Allura had once told him politics was a dance, as much about posturing and matching the rhythm of the room as about making a point or swaying someone to your side. There were, of course, debates and votes and compromises that had to be made, but so much of it was about building relationships. You had to know who you were dealing with and what they wanted, and they had to feel like you were willing to listen to them.

“I don’t get it, though,” Hunk said, glancing over his shoulder as the Yxtari, in their gauzy clothes with complex designs painted across their pastel fur, ambled away. They were a combative, contrary group—not at all opposed to the concept of a Coalition, of course. They acknowledged that the Coalition’s protection would be welcomed on Yxtar. They just didn’t want to have to risk anything by joining it.

“Don’t get what?”

Hunk turned forward again, his jaw still clenched from holding himself back during the conversation with the Yxtari delegate. The woman had an unpleasant demeanor, to be sure, and Shiro was genuinely impressed with Hunk for holding his tongue.

“Why do we _have_ to play nice with these people?” Hunk asked. “Like, I get it. Don’t offend the people you want to work with. But do we really want to work with those--?” He cut himself off, but Shiro had a pretty good idea what he wanted to say.

“Maybe not. But we don’t know for sure that we _don’t_ want to work with them. Until they prove themselves incapable of change, or unwilling to compromise, I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Besides--and I know this doesn't _feel_ true, no matter how many times you say it--no one is here as an individual. That’s the nature of politics: we collectively represent billions, and I’m not going to give up on an entire planet because their rulers happen to be jerks.”

“Huh.”

Shiro’s steps slowed, and he glanced over at Hunk, who seemed to be lost in thought. The quartet had moved on to something quicker, and a small company of delegates had adopted the center of the hall as a dance floor. Karen and Keena, too, had finally put in an appearance. Karen’s lateness didn’t surprise him much; she’d wanted to put a few finishing touches on her proposition before the talks began tomorrow. But Keena? Shiro was in agreement with Karen on that—Keena had an ulterior motive for coming here. He’d hoped that by allowing her to come via official channels he could keep an eye on her, but so far that hadn’t turned out to be the case, and he couldn’t help but be suspicious at her absence so far this evening.

He’d have to talk to Karen if he got the chance, and not just because of Keena. He was surprised she was able to focus at all with Pidge out there searching for Commander Holt. Shiro had tried to talk to Matt this morning, but his calls had gone unanswered, which was just another problem to distract him from the summit. At least he could expect news from Pidge—good, bad, or otherwise—by morning.

“Paladin Shiro!”

Shiro turned, plastering his smile back on as the petite Hegriva delegate approached. “Ora Mivava,” he said, inclining his head. “It’s good to see you. I had begun to worry that something had gone wrong.”

Mivava waved eir hand, rising up on eir toes to scan the room. “No, no, nothing like that. We were quite late in the queue, you know. Only just finished settling in and all that. Is it true we’re holding this summit on Eltava?”

Hunk shifted nervously at Shiro’s side, glancing at him like a kid caught stealing cookies. Shiro resisted the urge to grimace.

“That’s true. The Tava are widely known as mediators and have hosted a great many peace talks. Where better to lay the groundwork for the Coalition?”

Mivava narrowed eir eyes. (Two of them, anyway. The third had neither lid nor pupil, and sat like a polished stone in the center of eir forehead. Shiro hadn’t yet figured out how to ask what function it served.) “I suppose...”

Hunk shifted again, and Shiro shot him a mild look. He knew the truth, of course. It wasn’t tradition or consideration for those delegates who might be uncomfortable speaking honestly in the heart of Voltron’s power that had swayed this decision.

It was the fact that they still had a spy on the castle-ship, and no one could be sure that they wouldn’t have access to the conference chamber where the talks would happen.

True, any one of these delegates might decide to sell the Coalition out, but Shiro would be damned if he let himself be the one to leak sensitive information. He, Coran, and Allura had agreed that a banquet on the castle was a necessary risk—a gesture of goodwill for the delegates, hopefully without much chance of secrets being laid bare. A good number of these delegations probably expected the other delegates--or the paladins themselves--to be spying on them, anyway.

Mivava opened eir mouth to ask another question, but a flicker of light from the far side of the hall caught Shiro’s attention. Keturah’s hologram had appeared at Coran’s side, face impassive. But the fact that she’d made an appearance at all was worrisome. Coran had left Zelka in charge on the bridge, the AI monitoring the most vulnerable systems as a backup. If Keturah had come to speak with Coran, it couldn’t be good news.

The flash of horror on Coran’s face—quickly covered up with a strained smile—was even more alarming.

“Sorry,” Shiro said, holding his hands up toward Mivava. “I hate to interrupt, but something has come up that needs our attention. Hunk?”

Hunk nodded, managing a feeble smile for Mivava as they passed. Akira joined up with them halfway to Coran, hands clasped behind his back, moving like he was getting a drink and not mentally preparing for disaster. “On a scale of one to ten, one being Zarkon’s AI is pouting in a bathroom somewhere and ten being we’re all going to die within the next sixty seconds, how bad do you think this is?”

“Eleven,” Hunk muttered. “The AIs weren’t supposed to come down here during the banquet. Coran said it was probably bad to remind people what happened to the last paladins.”

Shiro grimaced, but said nothing. If the castle were in danger, surely someone would have just sounded an alarm.

Still, he craned his neck until he caught sight of Nyma over the crowd. She turned, smile fading when she noticed him. He jerked his head toward the door Coran had disappeared through, and Nyma nudged Shay.

Coran had accessed the comms terminal in this room, Keturah silent and grim beside him as he conferred with Zelka. He looked up as Shiro, Akira, and Hunk entered, then grimaced.

“What is it?” Hunk asked, tugging at his collar. “Are we under attack? Is Zarkon here? Did somebody plant another bomb on the bridge?”

“The castle-ship is in no danger,” Zelka assured him before Coran managed it. They both seemed flustered, but Coran perhaps more so—and when Nyma walked in with Shay, Coran’s expression crumpled.

 _Oh, no,_ Shiro thought.

“What?” Nyma demanded. “Shit, is it one of the others? Who—Val? Pidge? Did something happen on Galra?”

Coran closed his eyes, inhaling through his nose to steady his breathing. “We just received an emergency call,” he said, voice unnaturally even. “It would seem Zarkon’s forces have located Shay’s Balmera.”

* * *

There was no word yet on how badly the Balmera had been hit, or whether Zarkon’s forces were still in the area. Coran could have explained that it was one of the limitations of the emergency beacons: they could transmit incredibly quickly across vast distances and through most forms of interference, but they could only carry plain text, and Mir clearly hadn’t wanted to waste time on a lengthy explanation.

Coran _could_ have explained that, but it would have done nothing to ease Shay’s mind. She had nearly fainted on the spot when he relayed the message, and Hunk had barely managed to steady her breathing before she was on her feet again, staggering for the stairs with Hunk on her tail.

“Go with them,” Shiro said to Nyma. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Akira watched the paladins go, eyes wide in his pale face. “I can scramble the Guard,” he said. “We can--”

“No,” Shiro said. “I—Not yet. The Balmera nearly died in the fight last time; sending more ships might hurt more than it helps.” He clenched his fist, and his wrist-daggers—easily overlooked as simple bracelets while inactive—materialized in a flash of light. Shiro stared at them, seemingly surprised, and hastily put them away. “I’m going to make an announcement. We can’t have the paladins running off without a word in the middle of the summit _we_ called.”

Coran nodded, grasping at rational thought to keep him grounded. “Good idea. Keep it simple, though. No sense inciting a panic.”

Shiro nodded. “Get together with Kolivan and try to keep things running smoothly tonight. Between the three of you, that’s still more than half of the leadership of the Coalition. No one can accuse us of not taking this seriously.”

“True,” Akira said, lips twitching. “None of them know me that well yet.”

The gaunt lines of Shiro’s face softened for a moment, and he squeezed Akira’s shoulder before heading out into the grand hall. The chatter began to die off, slowly at first but then washing over the castle like a pall as visiting dignitaries took note of Shiro’s demeanor.

“My apologies for interrupting the festivities,” Shiro said. He must have reached the grand staircase, where a control panel in the banister allowed for the amplification of voices. Akira offered Coran a commiserating smile, then headed out to watch the speech.

Coran remained behind, Keturah still and silent at his shoulder.

“A few of you may have noticed my abrupt departure a moment ago,” Shiro went on. “Along with the fact that my fellow paladins have also excused themselves. We have just received word of an attack on allied territory. I know many of you were hoping to speak with me this evening, and I assure you I will be available as the summit continues, but my first duty is to the people suffering at Zarkon’s hand. Thank you all for your understanding. I leave you now in the capable hands of Lieutenant Commander Akira Shirogane. He, along with Commander Coran of the Castle of Lions and Commander Kolivan of New Altea, will be more than happy to speak with any of you until my return.”

The murmurs picked up again as soon as Shiro was finished, muffling Akira’s efforts to direct the crowd into the banquet hall, where the kitchen staff was ready to begin serving appetizers and the Androgonian quartet had prepared a special performance.

Coran should be out there now, helping to corral the crowd and soothe worries, but his heart was pounding, a chill sweat breaking out along his brow and down his spine.

“Breathe, Coran.”

Lealle’s voice startled Coran, but no more than it startled Keturah, who stiffened, wrapping her arms around herself as Lealle's hologram came around in front of Coran, catching his eye.

“Breathe,” she repeated.

Coran closed his eyes. “I’m fine. A bit too much nunvill, I suppose. It’s not good for the heart, you know.”

Lealle snorted. “You never could lie to me.” She ducked down, hand ghosting over his arm. “Come on. What’s this really about?”

“Nothing that should matter as much as this does,” he said, straightening his spine. “Reminds me too much of Altea, I suppose.”

Lealle’s form shivered for a moment, her smile faltering. “Ah. Right.” She blinked, shaking off her momentary freeze, and withdrew her hand. “I-I’m sure they’ll be fine. Balmerans are tough—right, Keturah?”

Keturah stiffened, seeming to shrink in on herself. “Yeah,” she muttered. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Lealle frowned, cocking her head to the side. “Everything all right?”

“Fine.” Keturah smoothed her skirts and nodded to Coran. “Call for me if you need anything else.”

Before Coran could respond, she’d vanished, her form winking out in a splash of pale blue pixels. Lealle stared at the spot where she’d been, once more taking on that frozen, flickering look she had when presented with something she didn’t have the mental framework to process.

Coran’s hand was on a level with her shoulder before he remembered himself. This was only Lealle’s echo, and it would do no good to try to comfort her.

Steeling himself, he shoved old aches and new fears down deep, forced a smile, and rejoined the tumult streaming into the banquet hall.

* * *

Shay remembered little of the flight home. She had traded her dress for her armor in the interim, but she could not remember when, or where. The fact that Hunk, too, had changed suggested it had been at his prompting, and that much she could well believe. She might not have remembered how to fly if not for both Hunk and Yellow inside her head guiding her.

Hunk had offered to take the controls. (She _thought_ he had offered, but perhaps it remained an unspoken thought somewhere in the bond.) Yet Shay was chilled to her very core, restless and sick, and at least this way she felt as though she were doing something.

Someone—Keturah, Hunk provided—had given them the coordinates relayed by the emergency beacon, and Yellow had opened a wormhole to the area. Hunk was expecting a fight. Yellow, too. Shay expected far worse, and the empty skies around her Balmera did not bode well for the fate of her people. From here, all seemed well, and almost Shay could make herself believe that the past ten minutes had been a horrible dream.

It was what awaited her on the surface that terrified her, and it was nothing more than simple momentum that kept her from turning back the way she’d come.

The Blue Lion kept pace as they descended, though Shay could not have said whether Nyma had followed or preceded them through the wormhole.

Hunk’s hand was on her back, rubbing small circles that did little to alleviate the pounding of her pulse in her throat as she brought them in. She thought he might have been doing the same since they’d left the castle, but her mind seemed to have removed itself from her body, sinking into the paladin bond where nothing and no one could reach her.

Too soon, the lion’s paws thudded against the Balmera’s surface, a song of mourning flooding through the cracks in Shay’s defenses. Her breath hitched, the song quieting inside her as it tried to parse into something real and concrete. She stood only when Hunk took her hand and encouraged her upward, and she trailed after him in a daze, the voices of home burrowing into a thick, warm cloud of white and never reaching her chest, where they might resonate and become real.

Figures had already begun to emerge from the tunnels by the time Shay reached open air. She knew their faces; many of them were members of her home circle, although there were a great deal of visitors from elsewhere across the Balmera. Each sang of sorrow and sympathy, and Shay recoiled from their consolation, her legs refusing to carry her beyond the end of Yellow’s ramp. Shaking, she scanned the crowed, eyes leaping from one familiar face to the next, searching for those she most wanted to see. Her mother. Her father. Grandmother Mir. Rax.

She saw none of them.

With each passing second, her breath came shorter, her world collapsing in on the missing pieces in this scene. She gasped, tears already gathering in her eyes, and she recoiled from Hunk when he turned to comfort her.

“Shay,” he said, the pain in his voice almost more than Shay could bear.

She shook her head, grasping for words that wouldn’t come, and wrapped her arms around her head. They were yet near enough to Yellow that she could feel his thoughts, and she knew he still clung to hope.

He could not hear the Balmera song. He could not taste the tragedy that had happened here.

The song told her when Rua, an Elder Shay had met only twice, broke away from the crowd. Her song was heavy, her steps light, as though she feared to cross an invisible boundary. Shay could not bear to look at her, though covering her eyes would not shut out the truth.

“Shay,” Rua said. “Daughter of the Balmera. It comforts us to see your face.”

“Enough with the niceties, already,” Nyma snapped. Shay jumped at her voice; she had not noted Nyma’s approach. “What happened?”

Rua faltered, her song twisting toward anger, then just as quickly toward shame. “The Galra returned,” she said, subdued. “Elder Mir feared a slaughter and activated the beacon you entrusted to us. Alas… the Galra had a far crueler intent today than indiscriminate slaughter.”

Shay’s heart skipped a beat, and she lifted her head, a horrible, strangling guilt coiling around her throat. “My family…?”

“Your parents yet live,” Rua said, “though they were badly beaten. They are below, resting in Balmera’s heart.” The Elder hesitated, touching her fingers to her forehead in a gesture of deep sorrow. “The Galra came for your brother Rax. Offered clemency for the rest of us in exchange for his surrender. Your family attempted to hide him, and your parents were beaten as an example.”

Shay pressed her hand to her mouth, discordant fragments of song swirling among the shapeless agonies in her soul. “No… No, Rax would not ask anyone to suffer in his stead.”

“Nor did he.” Rua paused, closing her eyes in a concerted effort to turn her song toward comfort rather than pain. “After the beating, he agreed to go with the Galra. Headstrong and protective that one is. He fought to be allowed out of the deep chamber where he had been sequestered. Elder Mir… Your grandmother gave chase. Tried to offer herself in his stead. The Galra... They killed her, and then they took your brother and left.”

* * *

Sam’s breath hitched, his whole body tensing like somebody had run him through with a thousand wires and then tugged them all at once. The suddenness of it, and the violence, startled Rolo out of his drowse, and he cursed, running his hands along Sam’s arms in an attempt to soothe him.

“You’re okay,” Rolo whispered, feeling sick as Sam spasmed again, a low groan escaping past his teeth.

They’d dragged him back here after nearly eight hours in the lab—long enough that Rolo’s mental projection had faltered and retreated back into his exhausted body. He didn’t know what they’d done to Sam this time, but whatever it was, it was bad. Even now, almost a full day later, he hadn’t regained consciousness. Not in his body, and not outside it. Rolo kept flipping between the two, worry and dread coiling inside him until he almost wished the druids would come for him, if only so he would have something else to think about.

With a long, shuddering breath, Sam sagged once more in Rolo’s lap. Rolo reached up to adjust the damp cloth draped across his forehead, which had fallen out of place during Sam’s fit. It wasn’t much to look at, just a ragged and stained scrap of fabric torn from Rolo’s shirt, and it was bone dry by now.

There was no water with which to dampen it again, however; every drop they’d been given had gone to Sam. Rolo wasn’t sure fluids would help whatever they’d done to Sam, but dehydration sure as stars could only make things worse.

“Feeling any better, old man?” Rolo asked, sagging back against the wall. “I think your fever’s gone down.” He pressed a hand to Sam's cheek, then frowned. "Maybe."

He trailed off, the silence sitting in his gut like a lead weight. It had occurred to him, late last night as he tried and failed to fight off sleep, that Sam might simply be gone. Whatever they’d done to him might have severed the last link between his mind and his body, or it had been so painful Sam couldn’t make himself come back.

Rolo wouldn’t blame him if that were the case. But the thought still made his skin crawl. He didn’t know what happened when the mind passed on. Their bodies still functioned when they stepped out of them for a few hours, so it was within the realm of possibility that the same would hold true even if there were no longer a Sam Holt out there to come home.

“You’re gonna laugh at me when you wake up,” Rolo said, curling around Sam’s body and forcing a laugh that was chased by tears. “You’re gonna get a real kick out of all the ways I worked myself up. Gonna give me a real tongue-lashing about how I oughtta’ve known better than to think you’d ditch me like this.”

He smiled, but he couldn’t hold it for long.

“Just—” Rolo cleared his throat, squeezing Sam’s arm. “Don’t die on me. You hear? We’ve still got families out there waiting for us to drag ourselves home. Don’t you make me tell your kids you didn’t make it, cause I won’t do it. I _won't._ ”

Sam tensed, and at fist Rolo thought it was another fit. But Sam didn’t move far. He just lifted his hand and gave Rolo’s arm a feeble squeeze.

It was more response than Rolo had gotten all day, and he jerked back, dashing away tears to search Sam’s face for signs that the worst was behind them. His eyes were open, though only barely, and they seemed to be having trouble tracking Rolo’s face. One corner of his mouth twitched in something that might have been a smile.

Rolo laughed, the icy shell inside his chest beginning to fracture. “You still with me, there? Thought I’d lost you for a tick.”

Sam closed his eyes, breathing out in a huff. It might have been a laugh, or an apology, or exasperation. It might have been all three. Whatever it was, it was proof that Sam was still in there, and Rolo went back to rubbing his arms, pulling him closer to try to share some of his body heat.

“Go on and rest, gramps. You focus on getting better. I’ll keep an eye on things till then.”

It was an empty promise, an echo of a life before this laboratory. Rolo would have laughed at himself except that Sam wouldn’t remember any of this when he woke up. If he woke up. It was all down to Rolo to pull himself through, and that meant he had to presuppose a world where sick people still got better and Rolo still came back from each appointment in the lab in some sort of shape to watch out for another sentient being.

Gods of the cosmos, he hoped this wasn’t going to be his new baseline.

Sam didn’t stir again for hours, though he seemed always on the edge of consciousness. Rolo tried to stay vigilant for a time, but without someone to talk to, without guards coming to drag him off to the lab, without even the ability to move around—at least, not without leaving Sam to sleep on the cold stone floor—Rolo’s mind diffused, and he found himself floating at the nexus between body, mind, and dreams.

The jingle of keys in the lock startled him awake some time later, and in his lap Sam gave a confused huff as his bed tried to buck him off.

“Sorry,” Rolo whispered, hushing Sam as the lock turned and the door swung inward on rusty hinges. Rolo’s stomach dropped, but if they’d come for him, they’d have to physically separate him from Sam. And if they’d come for Sam, they’d soon find out what an emaciated, one-legged half-Galra test subject was capable of when you pushed him a step too far.

But it wasn’t a guard who appeared in the doorway. Nor was it a druid, or a sentry, or a Galra officer. It was a Balmeran, his carapace chipped and flaking, his thick skin broken and caked with dried blood. He stumbled as the guards shoved him into the cell, then locked the door behind him and retreated back the way they’d come.

Rolo stared, his mind gone quiet with the novelty of it. He’d been here half a year or more, and he’d never seen another prisoner besides Sam. No one living, at any rate.

“Hey,” Rolo said, his voice rasping with interrupted sleep. He coughed, readjusted Sam’s weight in his lap, and tried again. “Hey, stranger. You okay?”

The Balmeran looked up, his eyes narrowing to slits when he saw who had spoken. He picked himself up off the floor, limped to the far corner of the cell, and sat down again, curling in on himself with his back toward Rolo.

Rolo sighed. “Come on, buddy. I’ve been where you are. I know it sucks, but stewing in it won’t make it go away. You hurt? They screw with your mind or something? Maybe I can help.”

The Balmeran lifted his head, lips pulling back in a snarl. “I need no help from a Galra,” he spat, then turned away again, leaving Rolo in shocked, frigid silence.

* * *

Shay had taken part in many funerals in her lifetime. Too many funerals, and repetition did not make the ache any less. Few of her people had lived long enough to die a natural death under the Galra rule, and so each new burial brought with it a new pain. Pain for what had been done, regret for the life stolen away. Fear of who might be taken next.

Grandmother Mir had already been old, but her age did not make the shock of her passing any less. She had always been a rock for her circle, the one thing the Galra could not sway. Even as a youngling, Shay had marveled at her grandmother’s strength and passion, and she’d once believed Grandmother Mir to be unkillable.

She supposed she’d never fully discarded that childish belief.

Shay’s mother was present for the burial, though she was yet too weak to take part. Her father had not yet woken, and the healers dared not move him. It made her mother's grief sharper in the song, and two others of the circle had to sit with her so she would not try to give of her thin reserve of Quintessence.

That left Shay to lead the burial, and she did so with heavy heart and tears streaming down her face. She knelt on the ground beside her grandmother’s body, hands pressed to the stone. No lights glowed in this chamber except the light of Quintessence, echoed a hundred times over.

 _Grandmother Mir knew the cost of standing against the Galra,_ Shay thought, channeling her memories of her grandmother into the Balmera song. _She knew, and still she fought. Even had she known how this would end, she would have done the same. She would not have stood by while one of her own was taken._

Others in the song echoed Shay’s sentiment, filling the walls with sorrow and pride and fondness. Grandmother Mir had shaped many lives, both within the circle and outside it. She would be missed, sorely missed, but Shay’s family would carry on her legacy. _Shay_ would bear that legacy as best she could.

Shay closed her eyes, lending her Quintessence to the Balmera and forming the image of her request. “Born of the Balmera are we. To Balmera we return. Our Quintessence is one, borrowed for a time and then returned to give new life. So we... So we return Mir to you now.”

The Balmera stirred in response to Shay’s song, and to the song of each gathered in this chamber near the heart. The ground shifted, stone folding over Mir’s body as swift and gentle as a blanket. Quintessence blazed in that stone, and the song swelled with sorrow and with hope, and Shay choked on another sob.

“Rest well, Grandmother,” she whispered, bowing until her forehead touched the warm stone beneath her. The Balmera reached out with her Quintessence to sooth the ache in Shay’s soul, and she leaned into the touch. Every Balmeran mourned, though not all as keenly as Shay's family, and Shay took comfort in their commiseration, but she knew a wound like this was not so easily healed.

Around her, silence. Each of the others lingered to say their final farewells to Shay’s grandmother. Then, one by one, they stood and left, until Shay was alone in the chamber.

Alone, except for Hunk, who approached and knelt beside her, his hands folded in his lap.

“Shay,” he whispered, voice hoarse. “I’m so sorry.”

Shay smiled at him, blinking back tears. Hunk had not known her grandmother well, but there were tears in his eyes and a thread of grief in his quiet song. Shay’s smile wobbled, and she leaned against him, the light of her Quintessence at last winking out.

“She is gone,” Shay whispered. “I… That seems impossible. I keep thinking there must have been some mistake. She cannot be…”

Hunk squeezed her tight, his fingers digging into the spaces between her armor. “I know. I know it’s not fair, and I—I’m here. I promise I’ll stay right here. Take as long as you need.”

Shay nodded, but she knew she could not linger. She would need an eternity for this to be okay, for her legs not to shake when she tried to stand. But she had no such luxury. Her people needed her. And so, although she wanted nothing more than to stay with Hunk in the dark and quiet, she forced herself to her feet, stopping only briefly in the antechamber to check on her mother—still bruised, still exhausted, still in pain, and trying to cling to Shay before she, too, was ripped away.

Then she squared her shoulders and followed the quiet, lonely tunnels to the heart of her Balmera.

* * *

“The other circles do not like this idea,” Rua said. “This… using the skylings’ weapons.”

“It’s not just weapons,” Hunk muttered to himself. Only Shay was close enough to hear, and she squeezed his hand in sympathy. Sympathy! As if she hadn’t just lost her grandmother _and_ her brother—which, yeah, Hunk didn’t much like the guy, but nobody deserved to be taken by the Galra, and whatever arguments they’d had in the past, Shay obviously still loved Rax. His absence tore at her as much as Mir’s death, as much as her parents’ suffering. Maybe more than either, since she seemed unable to make herself talk about it, even to Hunk.

Her parents, at least, were doing okay, all things considered. The Galra had been brutal in making examples of them, but their injuries weren’t life-threatening, and Shay's mother had been lucid enough when they'd visited to override the healer and accept Nyma’s offer of the portable med unit she kept in the Blue Lion. Shay's father had stabilized quickly after that, and Hunk was optimistic about his recovery.

That wasn’t to say it hadn’t gutted Shay to see them in that state, but it was the sort of thing that wouldn’t hurt so much in a few days, once her parents were up and moving again. Rax and Mir were another story entirely.

And yet here Shay was, comforting Hunk when he got frustrated over Balmeran politicking.

It was funny. He’d never really thought of the Elders as politicians. They were too nice for that, and there wasn’t a lot of bureaucracy to their Meets. But talking with Shiro had made him see things in a different light. The Meets might not feel political (usually) but it was a form of government, and the Elders were the ones tasked with the decision-making within that government.

“We do this not to fight,” Shay said, her voice surprisingly level, considering the state she’d been in when Rua had told her the Elders would welcome her into their council as Mir’s heir. She breathed in, squaring her shoulders. “Our people well know that Voltron neither asks nor expects us to fight in this war. We need not bring in weapons at all, though it may be wise to do so. If we could but augment our defenses with--”

“The Galra already ‘augmented’ our Balmera,” one of the other Elders snapped. “Forget not how that ended.”

Shay faltered, her momentum dashed by the interruption, and the ring once more descended into squabbling. Today’s attack had shaken them all, driving a wedge between those like Shay who wanted to see the Balmera better protected in the future and those like Rua who loathed the thought of bringing in alien tech none of them understood.

Hunk was left on the sidelines, grinding his teeth to keep from speaking out. He’d tried that once already, and had been told quite firmly that his contributions were not welcome here. He wasn’t a Balmeran, and he certainly wasn’t an Elder. The only reason he was allowed to be here at all was that Shay had requested his presence, and the others didn’t want to say no so soon after she’d lost half her family.

“We must do _something_ ,” Shay said, her tone modulating to something Hunk had come to recognize as raw desperation. “My home is shattered, my family frightened. I lost my brother, and we all lost Grandmother Mir, because we were unable to defend ourselves. I know not how the Galra located our Balmera, but they did. They may do so again. I cannot return to tell my circle that we will change nothing, and they must trust to the stars that the Galra will not return to claim more lives.”

Elders around the circle shifted uncomfortably—even those most vehemently opposed to Shay’s proposal to import Olkari defenses. Everyone agreed that something needed to change, it was just that half of them didn’t want _this_ change. Not that they had any alternatives to offer.

“We are Balmeran,” Rua said, humming a sorrowful melody. “We do not trade Balmera’s safety for our own.”

Shay closed her eyes, weariness stooping her shoulders. She’d tried—several times now—to explain that Olkari tech was not like Galra and that it wouldn’t hurt the Balmera the way Zarkon’s mining operation had. But it was no use. These people took technophobia to a new extreme.

Hunk was trying not to blame them—they had had some pretty bad experience with foreign machines—but it was hard.

An attendant ducked into the council chamber, hastily touching his thumb to his forehead. “Apologies. This one is here with a message for Elder Shay.”

Shay stiffened, as much from the title as from the promise of more trouble, if Hunk had to guess. She sent a tired look toward the antsy Balmeran lingering just beyond the curtain covering the door, then returned her gaze to the ring of Elders.

“Your forgiveness, Elders.”

“Go,” Rua said, crossing the ring with a stiff gait to take Shay by the arms. “Your circle has had a trying time. They need you. We will wait.”

Shay smiled, squeezing Rua’s arms in return before turning and hurrying to the door, Hunk close behind. “Aun,” she said, reaching out for the messenger’s hands. He was shorter and softer than Shay—probably a few years younger—and he stilled as she gave his hands a squeeze. “Pax. What has happened?”

“Grandfather Bel sent me,” Aun said. “Those who live near the main shaft have expressed discomfort with their chambers. Shay— _vex._ Elder Shay--”

“I am not yet an Elder, Aun,” Shay said. “Not formally. You may call me Shay.”

He hesitated, shuffling his feet.

Shay sighed. “Apologies. The others are uncomfortable with their quarters?”

“Yes. They… They fear the Galra will return, and that any who are easily reached from the sky may be taken. Some have moved to deeper quarters, and now fights have broken out between those who try to claim the same chambers. Grandfather Bel asked for your counsel.”

Shay squeezed her eyes shut, tension visible in every line of her body. This had been a constant theme since arriving six hours ago: every time something came up, no matter how trivial, someone came running to Shay for mediation.

“Can’t they just… figure this out themselves?” Hunk asked, unable to keep from scowling.

“Hunk.” Shay held a hand out toward him, her eyes pained. “It is fine.”

“It’s _not_ fine, Shay. Everyone keeps dumping things on you, and it’s not fair.”

Shay inhaled deeply, her gaze fixed on the floor between them. “Grandmother Mir named me her heir. If I am to be Elder of my circle, I must be there for all who need me.”

“Yeah, well, you shouldn’t have to do it alone.” He crossed his arms, heart aching for Shay. Couldn’t people see how tired she was? She needed time to rest—time to mourn. “You need help. _I_ want to help you. I know this isn’t my home, and these aren’t my people, but it doesn’t matter. I want to _do_ something. I want to help.”

Shay stared at him, wide-eyed. Then, slowly, her expression softened.

“Very well. Aun, tell the circle I am sending Paladin Hunk in my stead until the conclusion of the Meet. He is to be treated with the same respect you would show me, and his words as though I spoke them. He is one with me, and he will arbitrate whatever disagreements arise.” She paused, glancing Hunk’s way. “Is—Is that well with you?”

His heart gave a funny little flutter at being suddenly named acting Elder for Shay’s circle--and at her phrasing. _He is one with me._ But he nodded, straining for solemnity. “I’ve got this. You deal with the other Elders; I’ll take care of things back home.”

She smiled, bright and warm, and that helped to calm Hunk’s nerves. Shay reached out, grabbing Hunk by the arms and pressing her forehead to his for a brief moment before pulling back. “Balmera guide you, Hunk. I will return as soon as I can. And… thank you.”

* * *

There was someone new in the cell.

Another prisoner.

For a long time, that was all Sam could glean about the situation. Something had changed, but the newcomer was not a threat. He was to be pitied. To be sheltered, in what small ways Sam could offer shelter.

He wasn’t sure he could offer much of anything at the moment.

The last… hours? Days? They blurred together in his head, periods of darkness blending with an ache that went beyond anything else he’d endured at this lab. For a time, he’d felt as though he were drifting in open space, stars all around, his body cold and unresponsive. Other times, he felt he’d been buried alive, with wood and steel and earth pressing in on all sides until he could scarcely remember how to breathe.

He’d lost himself, but Rolo’s voice had called him back, bit by bit, until the world once more took form around him.

Slowly, the haze around his thoughts cleared, and he became aware of several new facts. First, the newcomer was a Balmera, a species Sam knew only because he had stumbled upon several references to “Project Balmera” in the lab’s computers and had asked Rolo about it. Second, the Balmeran hated Rolo, so far as Sam could tell, because of his Galra blood. He refused to speak to Rolo, and Rolo did his best to disappear.

Third, the stranger—who had given no name that Sam had heard—was in desperate need of a hug.

“I’ll be fine,” Rolo said the next time they took him to the lab. Fortunately, Sam’s ability to slip out of his body was unaffected by whatever had happened to him. If anything, leaving his body was easier now, and a welcome respite from aches and fatigue that refused to fade.

He stood now with Rolo, watching over a druid’s shoulder as she poked through Rolo’s brain scans. What she saw—what she was even looking for—Sam couldn’t say, but his mind was on other matters anyway. “What are you talking about?”

“The new kid,” Rolo said. “If he’s ever gonna talk, it’ll be while I’m not there. You should see if you can get him to open up.”

Sam couldn’t deny his curiosity, but still he hesitated. “You sure you don’t want me to stay?”

“Eh, it’s nothing I haven’t dealt with before.” Rolo flashed a smile, then crossed his arms on the back of the druid’s chair. “Go on. Kid seems like he could use a shoulder to cry on, and I happen to know yours is one of the best.”

Sam rested his hand on Rolo’s shoulder, waiting another few seconds in case he changed his mind, then let himself be drawn back toward his body. It was a curious feeling, like stepping off a cliff, except instead of hitting the ground, his awareness blacked out for an instant before settling back into the heavy confines of his body.

The Balmeran was watching Sam when he woke up. Their eyes locked for a moment, and then the newcomer flinched and turned back toward the wall. He’d remained in the corner of their small cell since he arrived, moving only to take his portion of the food and to relieve himself. He didn’t talk, didn’t look at Sam or Rolo, didn’t even uncurl to sleep. If he slept. For all Sam knew, he stayed up all night drowning in his fate.

“I didn’t catch your name.”

The Balmeran stiffened, his shoulders drawing up toward his horns. He turned his head a fraction, his luminous eyes peering out over his arm.

Sam waited, but it soon became clear that the boy had no intention of answering the question, so Sam sighed and leaned back against the wall. “My name’s Sam. Don’t know if I told you that yet. Sam Holt.”

“Holt?”

Sam’s heart clenched. “Yeah.” He paused, then went on in a whisper. “I take it you’ve met my children.”

“Your--” He broke off, uncurling a little more as he gaped at Sam. “ _Vex._ Do they know?”

“That I’m here?” Sam shrugged. “I don’t see how they could. According to Rolo, they’ve been looking for me—my son was with me when I was taken by the Galra, but we were separated.”

He wanted to say more. To ask how this boy had come into contact with the paladins. He seemed young—younger than Matt, to be certain. Too young to have been thrown into this mess. But Sam didn’t want to push. That the newcomer was talking at all was a huge step; Sam didn’t want to ruin it by crossing too many lines.

After a long moment, the Balmeran turned around, sitting back on his heels and watching Sam warily. “Rolo… That is the Galra who was in here before?”

“Yes. He’s been helping my kids and their team, so when he got captured, they shuttled him out to this barren patch of rock to rot away.”

“Did _he_ tell you that?”

“Why does it matter?”

“Because he is _Galra._ You cannot trust them. All they do is lie and steal and kill.”

“Not Rolo,” Sam said. He tilted his head, noting the defensiveness in the Balmeran’s posture. “I’m sure you’ve had bad experiences with other Galra, and I won’t diminish that. I can’t even speak for the universe at large, seeing as I’ve only ever seen one little backwater corner of it. Maybe Rolo’s the exception that proves the rule; I won’t argue otherwise. But I’ve been here with him for a long time, and I can promise you this isn’t an act.”

The Balmeran snorted. “You cannot know that. How often do they remove him from the cell? For how long is he gone? He may simply go to enjoy the luxuries of his kind before he comes back to trick you again.”

“Rolo hasn’t known many luxuries in this life, son, I promise you that. And he certainly doesn’t get anything like that here.”

“Yet you have only his word for proof.”

Sam had a lot more than that, but he didn’t want to say anything, despite the last few months giving no signs that the druids were watching this cell. What he and Rolo could do was too important an advantage to take that risk. Instead, he lapsed into silence. Sam was keenly aware of the fact that, despite his sour mood, the Balmeran had not yet retreated to the corner. For all his defensiveness, for all his irritability, he was a young man trapped far from home with very few options for companionship. He was lonely.

After a moment, he lifted his head. “My sister is one of the… She is off with your younglings.”

Sam turned, his heart in his throat. “What?”

“My sister.” The Balmeran glanced at the door, perhaps expecting a guard to be stationed outside. “She… left. Your younglings—your… kids. They came to my home and made friends with my sister, and when next they returned, she left with them. There was something wrong with Matt, and my sister offered her healing. Then... she became like them. A warrior. A soldier.”

Something _wrong_ with Matt? The words drove a spike through Sam’s heart, and he lost the train of conversation for a moment as panic narrowed his focus to a pinprick. The Balmeran's voice had turned bitter, hurt bubbling out as anger, but Sam couldn't focus on that. His son was-- _Matt_ was--

 _Nothing you can do from here,_ he told himself. Who knew how long ago the newcomer had met Matt. Last Rolo had seen, Matt and Pidge had both been fine. Sam had to assume that was still true. He had to, or he would drive himself mad.

“Rax.”

Sam raised his head. “Sorry?”

“My name,” the Balmeran said. “I am called Rax.”

Rax had unwound at some point during the conversation, coming within arm’s length. Sam reached out, moving slowly so as not to startle the boy, and rested a hand on his shoulder. “Nice to meet you, Rax. I wish it could have been under happier circumstances.”

Rax snorted and leaned almost imperceptibly into the touch. “You wish for an impossibility. The Galra spread only grief wherever they go.”

“Perhaps they do.” Sam squeezed Rax’s shoulder, drawing the boy’s gaze to him. “And perhaps you won’t believe me, but I promise you we’re going to make it through this. I’ll make sure you get home to your sister some day, Rax. Whatever it takes.”

* * *

“This wasn’t an accident.”

It was hours later, and Rolo had returned from the lab tired and sore, but no worse off than usual. Rax had resumed his stony silence—at least until the guard pointed at him and barked for him to follow. Without a word, Rax stood and shuffled from the room, his head bowed in resignation.

He was used to this life, to obeying without question, without arguing against whatever punishment his captors might choose to deal him.

“What do you mean?” Rolo asked. He, like Sam, had stepped out of his body. They sat together against the wall of the lab, watching as the druids settled Rax on the exam table. They didn’t bother with the restraints, and Rax made no protest as they began their experiments. At first, Sam had been surprised that Rolo had come here to sit vigil over Rax, but he felt foolish for it now. After all, as Rolo had said, Rax was a victim as much as either of them. He didn’t deserve to go through this alone.

“Rax’s sister is a paladin.”

Rolo’s head whipped around, and he breathed out in a hiss. “Vrekt. No kiddin’?”

Sam shook his head. “My kids. Rax’s sister. And you were working with the paladins, too.”

“You think they mean to use us as leverage?”

“I don’t see how this could have happened by chance.” Sam hesitated, but he’d already told Rolo what he remembered of his exploration of the lab during his last session with the druids. “I’m afraid of what it’ll mean—and not just for the paladins. If they really mean to turn us into robeasts, they’re going to make damn sure those kids know who they’re fighting.”

“A fleet of robeasts the paladins can’t kill…” Rolo ran his fingers through his hair, his eyes fluttering closed. “ _Vrekt_. I’m not going to let them use me against those kids.”

“Me either.” Sam was quiet for a moment, his stomach turning over as Rax closed his eyes against a pain Sam knew all too well. He made no sound, barely twitched where he lay. And Sam hated it. Someone so young shouldn’t be used to this sort of cruelty. “We have to figure out what they’re planning. Not just for our sake.”

“Right.” Rolo stood, resting a hand on the edge of the exam table as he crossed to the computer bank. If Rax could see Rolo, he would have resented the gesture, but Rolo offered it anyway, without any sign that he blamed Rax for his hatred. “No more playing it safe. We need to stop this thing. And soon.”

* * *

“The homeworld was cold, and not just in temperature. The sun was high, the streets overflowing with human refuse—er... Galra refuse?” Lance grimaced, but didn’t let himself dwell on the slip. “Might as well have been the dead of winter in some forgotten ghost town for all the warmth the sun and the passersby gave off.”

Thace heaved a sigh, and Lance raised his voice a fraction purely out of spite.

“On the docket for today: a meeting with our would-be allies. The old man still thinks it could be a trap. If I were a glass half-full sort of man, I might point out that these folks could have set a trap in our own apartment, no need to lure us out. But I’m not that optimistic.”

Keith paused with his back to the wall as he checked around the next corner, then raised an eyebrow in Lance’s direction. “You’re _not_?”

Lance huffed. “It’s a bit, Keith. You know—“ He ducked his head, weaving it back and forth as he raised an imaginary handgun. “I’m the jaded old P.I. tryin’ ta make a difference in this broken ol’ city o’ mine.” He leaned forward, blinking at Keith. “The hard-boiled detective? I explained this to you before?”

“I know you explained it,” Keith said. “It’s just that you really can’t pull it off.”

Lance’s lips twitched, but he flicked Keith’s ear anyway, just to prove he didn’t appreciate the callout. “Fine. We’re almost there, anyway.”

“And a bit of discretion would not be amiss,” Thace added pointedly. He glanced at them both, then continued on around the corner. Lance made a face at Keith, winning himself a smile, and hurried after Thace.

Sorbak’s Landing was an unassuming place: a small cafe built into an unused storefront along one side of a shipping center. A clunky freighter rumbled by overhead, settling down into one of the fenced-off loading areas behind the building as Lance and the others crossed the street.

The lights were off when they arrived—unsurprising for the middle of the night. There were a few bars still open, a handful of clubs and cinemas and other sorts of entertainment, but most people who were still up at this hour were headed home to sleep before they had to return to work in the morning.

That didn’t make it any less creepy to step through the—conspicuously unlocked—front door into a quiet cafe, all the chairs flipped up on top of the tables.

“Anyone else suddenly have a bad feeling about this?”

“Suddenly?” Thace muttered.

Keith’s ears swiveled as though searching for some indication that the people who had left the note had, in fact, decided to show up to their own meeting. He wore his mask on its usual setting, but his hand drifted toward the controls like he wanted to switch to the blank white _neza_ mask. Lance couldn’t blame him; he himself tugged his hood down lower, then reached over his shoulder for his rifle.

Something was definitely wrong here.

Before he could put his finger on what, the shutters slammed down over the windows and door, locking with a single, resounding _click,_ and every light in the room flared to life. Lance cursed, blinking away spots, and almost missed the black blur that barreled into Keith and carried him to the floor.


	20. Questions of Intent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... While sabotaging an Imperial superweapon, Nyma and Beezer found a missive from Haggar referencing something called Project Vindication. They passed the information to Meri, who did a little more digging and found that Vindication is one of a pair of projects started around the same time: Vindication and Retribution.
> 
> On the first day of the Coalition summit, the Empire found Shay's Balmera, killed her grandmother, and captured her brother. Hunk and Shay are still on the Balmera, Shay acting as Mir's heir and the new Elder for her circle, while Shiro and Nyma have returned to the summit.
> 
> Meanwhile on the Galra homeworld, Keith, Lance, and Thace were on their way to a meeting with the local rebellion, but when they arrived at Sorbak's Landing, they were met with an ambush.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Torture/experimentation on unnamed prisoners is alluded to in Meri's second scene, but nothing graphic is shown.

_Anyway, that’s where we’re at now. I know I’m not supposed to give you too many details as long as you’re undercover, but—Oriande! I can hardly believe it. That isn’t the sort of place ordinary people go. Maybe when all this is over, assuming I can find it, we can go back together._

_I miss you. Be safe.  
_

Meri reread Allura’s message, her eyes stinging. There was no signature, just as the transmission had been scrubbed of frequencies and coordinates and anything else that might identify the sender or recipient. Thace’s ciphers and the secure line Meri used should prevent anyone from intercepting her communications, but you could never be too cautious.

Unfortunately, another part of caution was sending as few messages as possible. It had been a little over four months since she’d infiltrated the Empire, and though she’d reported back to Coran at least once a week—if only to let him know she was still alive—she’d received just a dozen responses: five from Coran, three from Lance, one from Nyma, and three from Allura. Meri herself had told them not to get in touch unless it was an emergency or they needed information; in fact half of Coran’s messages and Nyma’s had been just that. “Here’s something else to look out for. Miss you!”

(Meri wasn’t complaining. She just… hadn’t remembered how isolating it was to go undercover.)

Allura’s message wasn’t exactly heavy on details, though it _was_ toeing the line just mentioning Oriande by name, but Meri could practically hear Allura’s voice in every word, and it made her ache to be back on the castle-ship.

“Okay, buttercup,” she muttered, blinking away her tears and smoothing her features with a light touch of Quintessence. She didn’t need to go looking like a puppy that had just been kicked. “Back to business.”

She glanced once more at Allura’s message, trying to formulate a reply that would be worth the risk of sending an unplanned transmission, then sighed and deleted the record. She’d send something along with her next report to Coran and ask him to forward it for her.

It was safer that way.

She turned, straightening her robes, and checked her shift in the glass of a Quintessence cylinder before she headed out. Her Nahra shift had become second nature by now, but her aim today was too dangerous to risk that cover. Today she was a druid—feared enough by the guards on the station she was visiting that no one ought to challenge her. Except maybe other druids. She’d have to try to avoid them.

It was a necessary risk. This lab—Kreya Agra, located on the second moon of an unnamed planet—had ties to Project Robeast. Not overt ties; the druids were too secretive for that. But Meri was sure of her assessment. They might not build robeasts here, but whatever they did was connected.

And considering she needed access to the Robeast files—Wyn’s files, at Coran’s request, as well as a deep dive in search of references to Vindication and Retribution, which Meri was increasingly sure were, or were related to, robeasts—she needed the kind of inside access she could only find in a lab.

She just hoped Dez’s predictions of agony and death didn’t come true.

* * *

This wasn’t the way this was supposed to go.

Lance stood in the middle of a cafe that was now on lockdown, his eyes streaming from the overbright lights. Keith was on the ground, the massive Galra on top of him trying to wrestle his knife away from him. Keith’s name sprang to Lance’s lips, and he brought his rifle around, but before he could get a clean shot, another figure in black armor and a featureless mask opened fire on Lance, forcing him to duck behind the counter or risk getting his head blown off.

Cursing and the rattle of bodies against the metal shutters covering the door suggested that Thace was busy with an enemy of his own, but Lance didn't dare take his eyes off the guy with the gun.

“Damn it,” Lance muttered, shooting twice at his opponent. His angle from behind cover was horrible, though, and both shots went wide. “You’re supposed to be on our side!”

He shot again, taking out one of the overhead lights as his opponent twisted away. They found shelter behind one of the tables, and Lance edged forward to glance at Keith and Thace--each caught in a wrestling match with far larger opponents. He had to figure out some way out of this. Preferably without alienating the Galra resistance. But thinking was difficult as helpless anger kept spiraling inside him.

It wasn’t just that this had turned out to be an ambush. He was well aware of the dangers of the homeworld, especially for a trio of revolutionaries. He knew that any number of people might want them all dead, and that they would do anything they could to get the drop on Lance and his friends.

The issue here was that they’d actually made Lance believe they were coming to meet allies. Six months on planet, and he’d started to worry that they’d be stuck chipping away at the Imperial overseers alone forever. Then that note had appeared to play on his optimism.

And look where that had gotten them.

Thace grunted, and something shattered. Lance spun, forgetting about his own opponent for just an instant, and saw Thace, now maskless, listing against the wall. A trickle of blood ran down the side of his face from beneath his mangled mask control unit, and his opponent tossed aside the leg they’d apparently ripped off a nearby chair.

“I knew it.”

The voice came from behind the counter, where a fourth figure appeared, stepping into Lance's line of sight. He was unarmed, short and scrawny in a way Lance hadn’t seen in any Galra besides Keith, and he stopped with one foot on Keith’s discarded knife. Keith’s mask, like Thace’s, had been ripped off, and he twisted beneath his attacker to glare up at the one who had spoken.

Lance started forward, but a laser flashed passed his nose, halting him in his tracks. He aimed again for his own opponent, still sheltering behind the table with his sights set on Lance.

From the corner of his eye, Lance saw the scrawny kid deactivate his mask, which glowed briefly purple before fizzling out entirely. He had a tiny screen projected in front of his left eye, and he wore his hair close-cropped, which only made his bat-like ears seem even larger. They quivered as he crouched down, and Lance would have made a joke about echolocation if the kid in question didn't look like he wanted nothing more than to spit on Keith's corpse.

“Prince Keith,” the boy said, lips curving up to reveal two small fangs. He lifted his head to glance at Lance, then at Thace. “And one of Prorok’s lapdogs.”

“Formerly.” Thace’s voice was soft, but it stopped the scrawny kid in his tracks. He blinked as Thace straightened, calmly wiping a trickle of blood off his brow.

The kid’s ears twitched. “What?”

Thace shot a warning look at the masked figure who had smacked him with a chair leg and seemed now to be contemplating a follow-up attack. “I said _formerly_. It has been quite some time since I was in the Empire’s employ.”

The kid narrowed his eyes, then stood and backed up as Keith began to thrash, apparently hoping the guy pinning him had grown complacent. (He hadn’t, and Keith’s struggled gained him nothing but an irritated grunt from Big and Beefy.)

“Keith,” Thace snapped. “Stop.”

“Like hell I will,” Keith growled. “You think I’m just going to lie here and let them—let them--”

“Turn you into a purple pancake?” Lance suggested, checking quickly to be sure Trigger-Happy the Cautious hadn’t gotten antsy again. “Cause, uh, I think they’ve already managed that.”

The scrawny kid just laughed as Keith roared in frustration. He strained for his knife, but the kid scooted it out of reach with his foot. “You know, you almost had me.”

“ _We_ almost had _you_?” Lance asked. “Says the guy who set a trap for us.”

Ears twitched, eyes narrowed, and the kid crossed his arms. “Like you haven’t been doing the same thing for the last few cycles? Trailing all across the homeworld, spreading rumors of all these jobs you’ve done conveniently out of the public eye. Showing up at rallies to ‘intimidate’ the IP, like they aren’t all your buddies anyway. I knew you Nezai couldn’t be as special as the stories all say, and now I finally have my proof.”

“What’s your problem?” Keith demanded, kicking out blindly with his feet. Big and Beefy barely even flinched when Keith’s heel connected with his shin. “You’d think we shot your yupper pup or something, _vrekt_.”

The kid laughed once, incredulous, then crouched down again, ducking his head until he was almost on a level with Keith. “You don’t even remember me, do you?”

Keith stilled.

“I mean, sure, it’s been ages, and I’m just some pathetic little nobody, but I hoped you might have at least registered the people you trampled to get where you are now. My vrekking mistake, I guess.”

It was difficult to read Keith’s expression from this angle, but he let out a confused huff that pained a clear enough picture. “What are you…?”

The kid leaned forward. “You still don’t remember? Come on, Keith. We were _classmates_.”

“Hey,” Lance said, biting down on a grin. “Don’t feel bad. He doesn’t remember a lot of his classmates, apparently.”

“Wait...” Keith’s voice thrummed with sudden revelation, his head jerking up as far as he could manage. “You’re Vit’s brother.”

The kid stared at him for a long moment, blank-faced, and then laughed bitterly. In a flash, he’d grabbed Keith’s discarded knife and driven it into the ground millimeters from Keith’s nose. “ _Vit’s brother._ Yeah, sure, why the krull not? Not like I have an identity in my own right or anything.”

He stood, spun, and stalked back toward the counter, and Keith squirmed, nearly managing to slip beneath Big and Beefy’s arm before the guy put him in a headlock.

“Wait!” Keith called. “I didn’t mean it like that—just—vrekt.”

“My name is Arel,” the scrawny kid growled. “Not that I’d expect a Prince to care. I'm not good enough for your little club of murderers, right?”

Keith froze, his eyes going wide, and Lance decided he’d had enough. He pushed back his hood, deactivating his mask in the same motion, and took a twisted satisfaction in hearing Triggy-Happy’s sharp intake of breath.

“No, no, no, no,” Lance said, lowering his rifle and stalking across the cafe toward Arel. Thace hissed his name, and a laser shattered a clay mug on the counter a few inches away, but Lance didn’t stop until he was close enough to jab a finger into Arel’s chest. “Nope, sorry. Not cool, dude. You don’t just get to call him a murderer and drop the mic. What the hell?”

Arel’s eyes were wide, his mouth slightly ajar as he stared at Lance. He must have expected another Galra, but Lance couldn’t even appreciate the humor in being the extraterrestrial in this Close Encounter, considering how it had gone so far.

Arel’s shock didn’t last long. He shook himself, swatted Lance’s hand away, and bared his teeth. (An adorable image considering he only came up to Lance’s nose.) “He completed his Proof, didn’t he?”

Lance blinked. “Uh… Proof?”

He cocked his head to the side, then glanced over his shoulder. To his surprise, Keith had gone completely slack in Big and Beefy’s arms, his face turned away from Lance, his shoulders pulling up like he was trying to hide. Bewildered, Lance turned to Thace, who sighed.

“The Proof is… a rite of passage, you could say.”

Arel hopped up on the counter. “All the officers have to do it. One last little test to clinch the job.” He shrugged, fiddling with a keypad on his wrist. “All you have to do is kill a helpless little prisoner with your own two hands. And from what my brother said, our good friend Keith here passed with flying colors.”

* * *

Infiltrating Imperial research labs never got easier.

Meri wore her stolen robes and mask because they were as good as any forged high-level ID, but the plain fact was she would have blown her cover in two seconds with any other disguise. From the moment she disembarked in the hangar of Kreya Agra, the thick, tainted aura of synthetic Quintessence smacked her in the face, dragging her back to the half dozen other such labs she’d visited already. Four of those had been decommissioned by the time Meri arrived, but a few short years couldn’t erase the horror that had been inflicted on their prisoner populations.

At the labs that were still active, it was infinitely worse.

Meri steeled herself now and stalked forward, nodding to the petty officer who had come to greet her. The shift she wore today was more reptilian than Lieutenant Nahra, with little fleshy nubs for ears. They didn’t move the way Nahra’s did, so that was at least one way in which Meri couldn’t give herself away. The mask covered her sickened expression, and she let her arms hang at her side, voluminous sleeves masking the tremble in her hands.

All she had to do was keep walking, but even that was a challenge, as the screams began as soon as the petty officer opened the door out of the hangar.

Meri’s stomach turned over, but she kept walking, trying not to let her hesitation show. She was only here for their records. She couldn’t let herself get distracted trying to plan a prison break on the fly. Even if it sounded like they were skinning that poor prisoner alive.

 _No._ She had her job. She needed to focus on it. When she was done, she’d send these coordinates to Coran and ask the other paladins to organize the rescue. That was how this thing worked. That was what it meant to be a spy.

“I can show you to the rooms we’ve prepared for you, mistress,” the petty officer said, his spine straight and his pace just a fraction too quick to be casual. It was the usual story. Even those who worked with the druids were scared of them, which Meri had used to her advantage more than once. You didn’t question someone who could drain the life from your body or tear your mind apart with a single thought.

“That won’t be necessary,” Meri said. On Earth, she’d learned to shift her vocal cords together with the rest of her body, modulating the tenor of her voice. She couldn’t mimic a specific person’s voice—not through a shift, at least—but she could make her druid shift’s voice low and raspy without having to strain. She spoke softly, but the petty officer still shivered and his hands, which were clasped behind his back, clenched with the effort of hiding his unease. Meri smiled. “There is much to be done.”

The petty officer nodded and produced a holopad from within his armor. “We have plenty of prisoners to choose from. I’ve already annotated the roster with demographic information, as well as notes on which prisoners are already part of an experimental group.”

“Excellent.” Meri took the holopad, but didn’t call up the list yet. Her hands still shook, and the petty officer was close enough that he might notice. Hopefully he didn’t think it was odd that she just tucked the pad up her sleeve and kept walking. “Take me to your records room.”

“Of course, mistress.”

Meri smiled behind her mask and quickened her pace, eager to shut herself away somewhere she could ignore the rest of this lab for at least a short time. When she’d first impersonated a druid, she’d had a nasty habit of rambling, trying to justify her demands, but it quickly became apparent that ordinary grunts and even most officers neither needed nor expected an explanation from the druids. They did what they wanted, and everyone else steered clear.

So it was that Meri soon found herself alone in the archives, the petty officer withdrawing with a deep bow and a sigh of relief that he didn’t quite manage to smother.

Meri sat at the main terminal at once, pulling a micro datachip from the hidden slot on Thace’s knife. (Apparently ordinary agents got a small storage space implanted beneath their fingernail, which was just creepy enough to make Meri dig in her heels on the knife storage, even if it wasn’t as secure as literally keeping it on her person at all times.)

She worked quickly, pulling files without stopping to check their contents. Dez had managed to get her set up with credentials that gave her access to restricted files, including those only stored on the local server, so Meri began a transfer of those files before digging into the prisoner database in search of information on Wyn.

It was surprisingly difficult to locate him in the Galra computer network. Anything on Project Robeast was slippery, of course, but Wyn more than most. Meri could only hope that Kreya Agra, itself an offshoot of Project Robeast, might have the files she needed.

Her search for Altean prisoners returned a single match, and she copied it over along with everything else, then retrieved her data chip and headed for the door. A real agent would have lingered on this base for a few days, making a show of experimenting on the prisoners before being called away by a prearranged missive. Really sell the illusion and all that.

Meri was not an agent of the Accords, though, and if she stayed here a single moment longer than she had to, she was going to be sick.

Besides. She didn’t actually need to worry about blowing her cover.

The petty officer who had greeted her was nowhere to be seen, thankfully. It was early evening on Kreya Agra, and Meri had made a point of telling him she didn’t want to be disturbed for several hours. He was probably in the cafeteria, his fur standing on end from being so close to a druid for so long.

Meri made it halfway back to the hangar before a wave of Quintessence hit her, chilling her to the bone. She stopped, heady and dizzy and sick to her stomach from the sudden influx of energy, and reminded herself that she wasn’t on a rescue mission. She couldn’t stop to help these people.

That didn’t keep her from following the pull of Quintessence to an observation window overlooking one of the labs. An Olkari prisoner was strapped to the table within, sedated, a druid and two members of the Imperial Medical Corps gathered around him. The room was bare of electronics except for the scanner in one of the medics’ hand and a comms unit resting in the Olkari’s palm.

Were they studying the Olkari arts? Trying to replicate them? Meri shuddered at the thought of robeasts with the ability to reshape or outright create any tech they wanted, and for just an instant she reconsidered her stance on rescue missions.

Before she could act on this reckless impulse, a hand clamped down on her shoulder, yanked her back, and slammed her against the wall.

* * *

It felt wrong to go back to the summit less than twelve hours after Shay lost her grandmother.

So, sure, it wasn’t exactly _Nyma’s_ loss, and she could appreciate the far-reaching effects this summit would have. And Shay and Hunk had stayed behind on the Balmera anyway, helping to clean up, rebuild, strengthen defenses, and to take care of Shay’s parents. It was just Nyma and Shiro who had returned to the castle-ship, filled in Coran and Akira, then stood around in awkward silence for a full minute while all of them fought not to be the one who would point out that there was still work to be done.

So here Nyma was, seated beside Shiro at a little table in the big, round chamber on Eltava where the summit was being held. In preparing for the summit, she’d discovered that the paladins had dress uniforms to compliment their armor—form-fitting Altean bodysuits styled so that the blocks of color from their armor became something a little bit more organic. One of the resident tailors had modernized the look a little bit, making it easier to get into. The end result was white slacks and a cropped white jacket over a black shirt, with their lions’ color marking the epaulettes, shoes, and the stylized V at the neckline.

It was all so… official. All tidy formalities and pleasant smiles and carefully scripted speeches. Nyma would have felt out of place here if if she hadn’t spent most of last night awkwardly trying to comfort Shay and the rest of her family. And, briefly, arguing with the healers about their technophobia and how it was putting their patients at risk. (Shiro had needed to drag her away from that one when he arrived, pointing out that Shay's parents had already made most of those points for her.)

It still left her feeling out of sorts. She’d never been one to go out of her way to help strangers, but that had begun to change since she joined the paladins. She’d discovered that once she stopped turning a blind eye to all the suffering in the universe, she couldn’t simply walk away. Being unable to help was infinitely worse than knowing how vrekked the universe was and making a conscious effort not to go looking for specifics.

And then there were the diplomats. Take the pomp and circumstance out of the proceedings, and Nyma might actually be in her element—all fake-cheerful smiles and backhanded compliments and quiet plotting.

Except, of course, Shiro was looking to her, as the only other paladin present for these talks, to act as a beacon of integrity and good graces toward their guests.

Gods of the cosmos, she just wanted to stab some of these people with her spork.

Coran was walking the delegates through the treaty Karen had drafted, breaking it down into responsibilities the Coalition had to member planets, duties member planets were expected to fulfill, and other minutiae of the intergalactic alliance process. Nyma managed to follow the conversation long enough to glean that Karen had taken care to lay out a variety of ways allies could contribute to the cause, from military support to supplies and manufacturing to taking in refugees from liberated planets, prisons, and labor colonies.

That was all well and good, especially considering how many delegates had already told Nyma in sugared whispers that they just weren’t sure if their people could contribute to an extended military campaign after everything they’d suffered at Zarkon’s hands—as though the entire universe hadn’t suffered the same horrors; as though doing nothing and hoping somebody else took care of the fighting would protect your people from getting crushed under Zarkon’s heel a second time.

Eventually, Nyma tuned out Coran’s ramblings, trusting Karen, Shiro, and the other leaders of these talks to handle any questions that might come up. Nyma focused instead on the people, watching as wary faces brightened and eager eyes dimmed and a small cluster near the back grew more and more sullen.

Well, they’d never expected to come out of this with one hundred percent of delegations ratifying the treaty. Best to focus on the people who wanted to help and let the others fend for themselves.

A few hours in, Coran finally wrapped up his presentation, and Shiro called a recess to let everyone stretch their legs and mull over the proposal. The core of the Coalition remained on the chamber floor to take questions and concerns, which would be addressed in the second half of the day. Tomorrow began the process of amending the treaty, and a few days after that, each delegation would deliver a preliminary response before taking the treaty to their respective worlds for debate and ratification.

 _Snooze_.

Nyma slipped out of the circular chamber, seeking some fresh air and a chance to stretch her legs. She bypassed the snack bar in the lounge and the clusters of politicians conspiring with one another in shaded corners.

The formal sessions provided her with more than enough of that, thank you very much.

For a moment, Nyma thought she spotted Keena through the crowd--odd, considering she wasn't supposed to be here. The lobby and gardens attached to the summit hall weren't technically restricted, but everyone was worried about security, so they'd limited attendance to the delegates and two assistants, advisers, or guards each--all vetted beforehand, to be safe.

Nyma's instincts itched at the sight of Keena here, leaning in to whisper something to an attendant before continuing onward. Nyma veered aside, irritation buzzing in her chest. Shiro would want to know what she was up to, though.

Unfortunately, by the time Nyma reached the place where Keena had been, the woman was gone, lost in the crowd of political elite. Nyma scowled, turning a slow circle. She found nothing, however, and the recess wouldn't last forever, so she relented, stalking out to the gardens in an even worse mood than before.

Unfortunately, she only managed a few minutes of peace before the stink of politics caught up with her, this time in the form of a skittish assistant dressed in a curious pink and green getup that reminded Nyma of a tropical flower. What planet were they from? Nyral? Korianma? There were way too many delegations here for Nyma to keep track of them all.

“If you want to ask something about the treaty, you’re in the wrong place,” Nyma said irritably, leaning against a stone wall that overlooked a lower terrace of the gardens. “You’ll want to talk to Shiro or Coran; I promise you, I don’t know shit.”

The assistant shuffled their feet, two rows of eyes blinking sluggishly. “Um.”

“Inside,” Nyma said, flicking her wrist back toward the door. “They’re in the big round room. I know it’s crowded in there, but Shiro’s got the patience of a vrekking Balmera. He’ll stick around long enough to talk to you.”

Still the assistant lingered, one hand plunged deep into their pocket, their eyes darting around the garden like they expected to be interrupted. A few other delegates had come out here, but they all kept their distance—clearly they were feeling cooped up same as Nyma, and clustering together kind of defeated the purpose of running away.

The longer the silence wore on, the thinner Nyma’s patience wore, until she was twitching with the impulse to summon her bayard before this runt decided to pull a grenade or something.

She spun, a threat on her lips, just as the assistant finally withdrew a small holopad from their pocket, thrusting it toward Nyma with a deep bow.

“What the…?” She stared at the holopad, heart pounding. “What’s that?”

“A message from the Delegate,” the assistant whispered. “He wishes Voltron to know his goodwill.”

 _That_ didn’t sound like a pretty lie at all. Nyma stared at the assistant, and at their holopad, for a few moments longer, then reached out to take it, still expecting this to somehow be a trap. The pad didn’t immediately explode when she grabbed it, however, and Nyma held it close to her chest as the assistant straightened.

“That’s it?” she asked. “You’re just a courier?”

The assistant gave no answer.

Well, nothing for it, she supposed. Watching the assistant from her periphery, Nyma turned the holopad on and glanced through its contents. There was a single memo in the pad’s memory, and when she opened it, she found only a few lines of text, written out three times in Galran, patchy Rylossian, and what she could only assume was the native language of the one who had written it.

 _Lady paladin,_ the message read. _I have heard many stories of your bravery and kindness, as well as of the questions you ask of each prisoner you rescue. I lament that I cannot offer you more, but through my contacts, I can assure you that your companion, the smuggler known as Rolo, is alive, and is being held somewhere in Zarkon’s prison network. I will of course forward any additional information I may find on his condition or whereabouts, and I wish you the best of luck in your search._

Nyma stared at the message, numb to her core, her eyes skipping back up to Rolo’s name a dozen times before she parsed the contents of the message.

Rolo.

_Alive._

“Where did you--?” Nyma looked up, only to find herself alone in the garden, the assistant having slipped away while she was distracted. Confusion, rage, and an ache she thought had dulled over the last seven months rose to a pinnacle, and she squeezed the holopad so hard her knuckles ached.

No. _No._ These people didn’t get to just _drop_ something like that in her lap, then walk away without a word. Shoving the pad into her pocket, she stalked back toward the door, decorum be damned. More than one delegation turned toward her approach, greetings and questions about the treaty dying on their lips as they picked up on her temper. She stormed past them all, only pausing long enough to register that none of them had features to match the messenger.

She finally found the delegation in the main chamber, waiting near Shiro, several of the members sagging with boredom and fatigue.

“Okay, what the hell?” Nyma demanded, storming up to them and waving the holopad in their faces. “This better not be some sort of sick joke.”

Shiro’s head snapped up, and he glanced sharply toward Coran, Akira, and Karen—all ranged around the room engaged in their own conversations—before murmuring an apology to his own conversation partners and heading Nyma’s way.

“Joke?” the delegate asked, eyes wide. “I don’t know--”

“Bullshit.”

Shiro’s hand came down on her shoulder, his voice urging discretion that, frankly, Nyma didn’t give two shits about right now. “Is everything all right?”

“ _No_ it’s not all right,” Nyma seethed, ripping her arm away from Shiro and stepping closer to the delegate. “Your assistant brought me this message, and I want to know why the fuck you thought that was okay.”

Now Coran had peeled off, concern in his eyes as he sidled up beside Nyma—not touching her, not trying to hold her back, just… waiting. It would have pissed her off if he didn't look ready to fight someone on her behalf.

The delegate shrank back, glancing around at her entourage. “I’m—I’m sorry, Lady Paladin. I didn’t send you any message.”

Nyma’s heart skipped a beat, and she glanced at the other faces, searching for the assistant who had brought her the holopad. “What? No. No—they were wearing your clothes. They were one of your people!”

Except they weren’t. They weren’t among the delegation, and those lost, uncertain looks were too good to be faked, not unless the entire delegation was a sham.

Then who the chix had sent this message?

Suddenly aware of the weight of three dozen eyes on her, Nyma balked, shrinking away from Shiro, Coran, and the delegate before she broke and stormed out the door.

* * *

“Who are you?” a voice whispered in Meri’s ear. “And why--?”

She didn’t let him get further than that. She dropped, twisting as she did so to dislodge his grip on her shoulder. He’d pressed her up against the wall, and she used that to her advantage, pressing her back to the wall, planting her feet on her assailant's chest, and shoving. He grunted, drawing back, and Meri drew Thace’s knife as she charged forward, swinging for his face.

Her attacker—a pale Galra in a surgeon’s uniform—caught her wrist, swinging simultaneously with his other hand. The watery light of the crystals glinted off his blade.

A blade, she realized as it came to rest against her throat, that was nearly identical to her own, down to the glimmering blue sigil on its hilt.

A smile tugged at the surgeon’s lips, and he released her hand, straightening as he put his own blade away. “I thought as much. Come. We shouldn’t talk here.”

He turned without a word and walked away, leaving Meri no choice but to follow, doubts swirling. Did she trust that just possessing a luxite blade meant he was an agent of the Accords? Or might he have stolen it from another agent to use in flushing out other spies?

Somehow, she didn’t think he would take kindly to her walking out on him, and if he _was_ hunting down New Altea’s spies, Meri ought to at least try to take him down.

So she followed, eyes trained on the back of his head. His pale lavender fur was incredibly fine, and he had only a narrow crest of white hair atop his head—white hair, and white facial markings that seemed to glow in this light. His angular face was stern and unreadable, his eyes unusually small for a Galra.

Something about him seemed… off. She couldn’t pinpoint how.

The Galra led her to an empty surgical theater, where he pressed his palm to a computer console. A moment later, the indicator lights on the cameras in the corners of the room winked out, and he nodded in satisfaction.

“We have some privacy now, at least for a moment.”

“Wonderful,” Meri said, straining to stay at least somewhat in character until she was sure this man could be trusted. “Now do you mind telling me who you are and what you think gives you the right to manhandle me like that?”

He inclined his head, either missing or choosing to ignore the reproach in her voice. “I am Ulaz drul Erzok, one of the senior surgeons on Kreya Agra.” He left the _agent of the Accords_ part unsaid, but his name was proof enough.

“Ulaz.” Meri inclined her head. “I was told to keep an eye out for you. The man who gave me that dagger said you would be a great asset to my mission.”

Ulaz raised an eyebrow, but didn’t take the bait.

“Thace,” she said, dropping her voice low. “I don’t know if you heard what happened, but he made a rather… dramatic exit from the service. I met him after that, and he gave me this knife. Told me about you.”

“He gave you his knife?” Ulaz asked, sighing heavily. “That does sound like him.”

Meri grinned, but quickly sobered. “Okay, but how did you know I didn’t belong here? I thought I was doing pretty well.”

“You were. But you need to be careful around druids. Many of them have Altean blood, as I do. If they know what to look for, they can distinguish Altean Quintessence from Galra, especially if it runs pure.”

“They--?” Meri cut off, her mouth running dry. Shit. She’d considered it, of course. Different species gave off different Quintessence signatures; that was what had seemed off about Ulaz, though she hadn’t recognized it at first. His Altean heritage didn’t present very strongly in his Quintessence, though it obviously conferred other traits. Galra weren’t known for their sensitivity to Quintessence.

Which was why she’d assumed she’d be safe.

Ulaz nodded. “Your Quintessence made me think you were one of ours, but our agents all learn these things before first deployment.”

“What can I say?” Meri said with a shrug. “I’m self-taught.”

Ulaz pinched the bridge of his nose, the markings on his forehead furrowed. “Why were you here?”

“Information,” Meri said. “Why?”

“You said Thace sent you to me. I’ll help you if I can, for his sake. I doubt he would appreciate me leaving you to expose yourself to the druids.”

Meri grimaced. “No, I don’t think he would.” She hesitated. “Have you heard of anything called Vindication or Retribution?”

Ulaz’s eyes widened.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“I haven’t heard anything about a project called Retribution,” he said slowly, “but Project Vindication… It grew out of Project Robeast, though by now it is almost wholly independent. I don’t know any details, but… Command calls it the future of our conflict with Voltron.”

“Aw, hell,” Meri muttered. “I was afraid you were gonna say something like that.”

The computer beeped, and Ulaz tapped a key hastily. “Our time runs short. I will look into these projects as I get the chance. You should stay clear of the druids.”

“I’ll try,” Meri said.

They exchanged comms frequencies, and then Ulaz was gone, slipping through the far door as Meri returned the way she’d come, heading for her shuttle as fast as she could without outright sprinting.

It was a good thing she’d never planned on sticking around.

* * *

Arel and his team escorted Keith, Lance, and Thace through a hidden door in the back of the cafe, and down a long, featureless stretch of tunnel. The brute who’d pinned Keith had confiscated his knife and sword, and the others were similarly stripped of anything potentially useful. It left Thace tense and Lance antsy, and on any other day Keith would have fought with his bare claws to get away, but right now he just… couldn’t.

_Murderer._

It was a fair accusation, and Keith found it hard to be angry at Arel for making it. It was hard to think of anything except Lance’s horrified silence when it was all laid out for him. It left a block of ice in his gut that made breathing difficult, much less fighting.

The rebels had every right to distrust him, knowing what they did. Knowing what he’d had to do to earn the rank of Prince in the first place, even if he’d had a leg up from his father. The fact that Arel hadn’t ordered them all shot on sight was more than Keith had any right to expect, and he couldn't push them any further. _Wouldn't._ The simple fact of his existence had already done enough to screw this alliance; he wouldn't make matters worse by throwing a fit.

Lance tried a few times to strike up a conversation with the guards, but they only ever answered by nudging him with the butt of a rifle, and eventually he sank into sullen silence.

By the time they reached the holding room—too spacious to be called a cell, with a table and chairs and a couple of cots along the wall and a bathroom behind the door in the far corner—Keith was choking on the silence, his skin crawling with the accusations he knew were coming. Lance paused just inside the door, surveying the room like he was considering renting the space, and whistled.

“Well this is the nicest prison _I’ve_ ever been in.”

Arel growled deep in his chest. “I’m not my brother,” he said, and slammed the door behind them. The lock whirred, and the final _click_ reverberated in Keith’s throat. He stole a look at Lance, who remained at the door, hands on his hips, and at Thace, who had already settled himself into one of the chairs, looking for all the world like they were here for a friendly cup of tea.

It was all too much. Seeing Arel again, seeing the venom in his eyes. Keith shook like he was fifteen again, standing at the edge of the Arena sands awaiting his Proof. How did he remember that so clearly? The anticipation, and the nausea that came after stood out crystal clear in his memory, but the Proof itself was a blur of terror and pain and blood that sat on his tongue for days after the fact.

Pulse thundering in his ears, Keith retreated to the cots in the far corner, as far from Lance as the locked door allowed—short of locking himself in the bathroom so he didn’t have to face his single greatest regret. He sat and pulled his feet up on the bunk, the room around him spinning on an angle. He couldn't have felt more hollow if Arel had gutted him with his own knife.

It was his own damn fault though, wasn’t it? If Keith had just told Lance about his Proof up front instead of trying to hide from his past, then Arel wouldn’t have had any leverage over him. It wasn't like Matt didn't already know all about the Proof. Keith had even told Shiro some of it, if not every detail. But that was different. Matt could see inside Keith's head to know how much he regretted it, how much he'd changed, and with Shiro, Keith had been able to tell his side of the story. (Had been able to _lie_ , a corner of his mind said. After all, if he'd done nothing wrong, why did it matter who told the story?)

Lance sighed, then turned, his boots scuffing against the tiled floor as he approached. Keith froze, hoping desperately that Lance would join Thace at the table, because Keith wasn’t prepared to have this conversation now. Wasn't prepared to defend himself, and didn't know how to apologize--for the Proof or for hiding it from Lance. Keith couldn’t even make himself look up, but a few seconds later Lance’s feet entered his field of vision.

For a moment Lance hesitated, and Keith’s heart began to pound—all the more so once Lance turned and sat beside him, his weight making the cot sink.

“So...”

Keith hugged his knees closer and turned his head away. _Don’t make me talk about this, Lance. Don’t make me prove Arel’s point._

The words swirled in Keith’s head, sticking behind his teeth, but he couldn’t make himself say them. What right did he have to ask Lance not to pry? He’d already hidden this long enough.

Lance was quiet for a long moment, his hand resting on the cot between them like he wanted to loosen Keith’s death grip on his knees and take his hand. He didn’t, though, and whether it was out of consideration for the fact that Keith was already overwhelmed, or whether it was Lance’s own uncertainty, Keith was glad for it. He thought he might have collapsed under the weight of Lance’s touch.

“That Arel guy’s a real douche, isn’t he?”

Keith swiveled one ear toward Lance, surprised not to hear disgust in his voice. He might have been commenting on an extravagant hat they’d seen at a spaceport for all the gravity he’d put into it. “He's not wrong, though... About me.”

Humming, Lance tipped his head to the side. “You mean he wasn’t just blowing hot air? Cause I know you, and I have a hard time believing that he’s telling the truth.”

Keith's shoulders tensed, fear and pain and guilt compacting into a fervent, spiraling anger. “Yeah, well, he is.”

“From his perspective, sure.” Lance smiled as Keith turned his head to peer at him over his arm, and something about that smile softened the jagged edges of the hole in Keith’s chest. “Look,” Lance said. “I don’t know if Arel has a grudge against you or the Empire at large—or his brother, apparently? Whatever. Even if he’s not straight up lying to get under your skin, he’s still got a grudge the size of a lion, and that’s going to affect how he sees this whole Proof thing. So if it’s okay with you, I’m just gonna ignore it unless and until I hear it from you. Because frankly? I trust you a lot more than I trust him.”

Emotion smacked into Keith, shattering his shell of frustrated rage, and for a moment he couldn’t remember how to breathe. “You… You still...” He couldn’t finish the sentence, but Lance just smiled.

“Of course I trust you, samurai. Come on. We’ve come at least that far, haven’t we?”

A lump rose in Keith’s throat, but he nodded, unwinding enough to lean over and press his shoulder to Lance’s. “Yeah.”

Lance nodded, as though that settled everything. As though there weren't secrets and pain and the echo of Arel's words clogging the air between them. As though it didn't matter that Keith's Proof might mean the difference between allying with the rebels and making enemies of them all. Lance just shifted, putting an arm around Keith. He wasn't pushing--seemed not to feel the need to speak at all, and somehow that brought Keith nearer to tears than anything else. Keith could have kept his mouth shut and let that be the end of it. He didn’t need to justify himself. He didn't need to own up to what he'd done.

But now that his Proof had been dragged up, it sat heavy in Keith’s gut. He leaned on Lance’s shoulder, listening to him breathe, until he finally worked up the courage to speak.

“Nothing Arel said is a lie. It's-- The Proof is a rite of passage. The final exam for people who want to become officers--even the ones who were born to it. Everything they taught us was to prepare us for the Proof. ‘Victory or death.’ ‘Mercy is for the weak.’ You... You didn’t last in training if you weren’t ready to kill, and then at the end, they made you prove it.”

“With the Proof,” Lance said, neutral.

Across the room, Thace had turned, his gaze intense. Keith curled in on himself, throat closing again until Lance rubbed his arm soothingly.

Keith closed his eyes. “We did it with the whole class watching, and all our families. Just you and a prisoner on the floor of the Arena, fighting until one of you died.”

Lance breathed out, sharp, like he’d been punched. “So basically what they did to Shiro, then.”

“Except I didn’t have to be there," Keith said, the anger flooding back in. He wanted to push Lance away. Wanted to grab on and never let go. "I could have refused to fight. I could have dropped out of training.”

“Yeah, and was any of that actually an option in the Empire?”

Keith hesitated, the words turning sour on his tongue. “Arel and Zuza chose that option," he said. "And Rolo. I’m the only one who kept going.”

Lance was quiet for a long moment, then twisted sideways on the cot, pressing his free hand to Keith’s cheek until he risked looking up. He was ready for anger, for fear--for disgust, even. He didn't expect Lance's gaze to be so steady, or for his brows to knit like he was worried not _about_ Keith, but _for_ him. Even Shiro--even Matt--they'd been shaken by Keith's story. They didn't hold it against him, but it reminded them too much of the Arena for them to take it in stride.

“None of that is on you,” Lance said, his voice far too kind for what Keith had just told him. “You were a kid, and everyone kept pushing you to fight. And Zuza ended up on a prison world where she probably would have stayed until she died if not for Voltron, so it clearly wasn’t as simple as just saying, _No thanks,_ and going on your merry way.”

Keith shrugged, his tongue turning to lead in his mouth. No, it wasn't a simple thing, to defy the Empire. But it was possible. Keith had done it himself, in the end. And he had no excuse for not doing so sooner.

Huffing, Lance threw his arms around Keith and crushed him to his chest. “Thanks for telling me all this. And, fair warning, I’m probably going to punch Arel first chance I get, cause he’s a dick and he doesn’t know the first thing about you. You did what you had to do to survive, and then as soon as you got free of them, you started fighting back. That’s as much as anyone can ask for. That's _more_ than they have any right to expect.”

Tears burned behind Keith’s eyes, and he squeezed them shut, burying his face in Lance’s chest. He couldn't put words to his gratitude or the deep, aching fondness he felt for Lance in that moment, but he clung to Lance’s armor, shuddering, until the urge to cry subsided.

* * *

Coran found Nyma stewing in the Blue Lion’s hangar late that night. The day’s sessions had long since wrapped up, but there seemed a never-ending stream of delegates looking for a chance to charm, barter with, or otherwise cross verbal swords with the heads of the Coalition.

Shiro, as was his wont, had assured Coran he had it covered, and that Coran could head back to the castle early. Coran had taken one look at Karen—tired and frazzled but suddenly brimming with a mother’s protectiveness—and the two of them had wordlessly begun to run interference, handling questions and requests that didn’t actually need Shiro’s personal touch.

Nyma hadn’t made a reappearance since storming off during the midafternoon recess, not that Coran could blame her. He'd felt her turmoil, the raw note in her voice burrowing under his skin and festering. It had been all he could do to make himself focus on the summit for the rest of the day.

He found her now without much trouble. With the numerous delegations retiring to the castle-ship for the evening, there were only so many places she could go to be alone, as she most certainly wished to be. In another situation, she might have already been asleep, or have gone down to the training deck to burn off excess energy. Except that it was the wrong sort of energy burning in her now—not a drive to act, only restless thoughts. Even had she gone to the training deck, she likely would have found she lacked the focus for a duel or target practice and, frustrated, she’d have ended up back here anyway.

It wasn’t that Nyma truly wanted to be alone, after all. She merely had a narrow range of company she could tolerate tonight.

Blue had her head down when Coran arrived, her mouth open and her ramp extended, almost as though she’d known he was coming. She didn’t shift as he approached, but he felt her eyes on him, and her gratitude was a palpable presence in the air.

Coran paused long enough to press a gloved hand to her tooth, smiling as a rumble ran through him. “Not to worry, Blue,” he said softly. “I’ve never been able to ignore someone who was hurting. I’m certainly not going to start now.”

She seemed satisfied with that promise, and Coran continued up the ramp, not at all surprised by the soft voices he heard drifting down to him.

“Maybe they were telling the truth,” Val said. “Maybe Rolo really is alive?”

Nyma sighed, and Coran could immediately tell that she was on edge, her composure hanging by a thread. His heart gave a sympathetic twinge. “If they were telling the truth, then why lie about who they are? Why drop an anonymous note in my lap and then disappear?”

“Any number of reasons.”

Val’s own presence was one of forced cheer, her voice light and her shoulders square, but Coran could sense the concern lurking beneath the polished surface. He paused just outside the cockpit to watch them, Val and Nyma seated side by side against the rear wall.

Val began to count on her fingers. “Maybe the reason they know about Rolo is because they have, or _had_ , some connections with the people holding him prisoner, and they’re scared of retaliation. Or they’re scared they’ll lose their place in the Coalition if those connections come to light. Maybe one of the delegates wanted to hold that information back as a bargaining chip, and someone in their group decided that wasn’t cool. Maybe they’re planning on extorting you, and this was just setting the hook—I mean, hell. They don’t have to be good people to be telling the truth.” Val paused, studying Nyma’s face. “Maybe they’re just bad with people. _Tell_ me you can’t see Pidge anonymously emailing important intel to potential allies because it’s easier and doesn’t require being social.”

Nyma cracked a smile at that, the storm raging beneath her skin easing up.

Coran lifted a hand and knocked on the wall beside him, drawing both girls’ eyes his way. Nyma instantly tensed, curling inward with a degree of shame that left Coran momentarily breathless. Val at least seemed happy to see him, smiling at him as she patted Nyma’s arm.

“Done with the politics for today?” Val asked.

Coran nodded, walking into the cockpit. “About time, too. Any longer and I might have shifted into a raging verglick just to clear the chamber.” He paused a few feet from Nyma and Val, hands clasped behind his back, and rocked up onto his toes. He weighed his options, then took a seat beside them, leaving a few inches of space so Nyma wouldn’t feel crowded. “I’m not here to lecture you, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said, crossing his legs and folding his hands in his lap.

Nyma lifted her head, suspicion playing out across her features. Amazing how he’d once thought her difficult to read. Now she was an unlocked holopad to him, all her files waiting just a tap away. “Well that’s good,” she said. “Cause I don’t take well to lectures.”

“ _Nyma,_ ” Val huffed, poking her in the side. Nyma glowered at her.

Coran just leaned his head back, marveling at the vibrations he could feel in the metal. Even sitting perfectly still in her hangar, you couldn’t forget the living machine beneath your shoes. “Actually, I just wanted to ask you how you’d like to handle this situation.”

“What. Really?” Nyma leaned her weight on her hands, eyeing Coran like she expected him to burst out laughing at any moment. “What’s the catch?”

He held up his hands. “I only want to help. I know...” He turned away, Nyma’s aches pulling him back toward his own darkest moments. In the wake of Lealle’s death, he’d felt very much the same as Nyma did now: consumed by a hurt he didn’t know how to ease and ready to tear the fabric of reality itself if it might make things a little bit better. “I know you’re hurting,” he said at length. “And I know right now it seems too big to bear.”

He turned, meeting Nyma’s eyes.

“I want to help—however you see fit. I can help you look for the one who wrote that message, or I can analyze whatever it is they gave you. See if it might point us toward Rolo. I can give you tasks to take your mind off it, or I can cover for you with Shiro and the rest if you don’t want to face the delegates tomorrow.” He reached out and gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Or we can start with a hug, if that’s a little less daunting.”

Nyma hastily wiped her eyes, laughing self-consciously, but she leaned into Coran’s offer, and he folded his arms around her, scooting closer to make it less awkward. “What the hell is it with you people?” she muttered. “All this loving and supporting. It’s like we’re in a vrekking holodrama.”

Val grinned, and the force of her gratitude hit Coran like a blow to the diaphragm, forcing the breath from his lungs.

Nyma pulled back, frowning at him. “You okay?”

Coran shook his head, thoughts a chaotic mess. “Fine,” he said, his stomach turning over as emotions that felt suddenly out of place competed for his attention. Concern. Loneliness. Fear. Gratitude. “I could have sworn I…”

“Yeah…?”

“Nothing.” Coran forced the nausea down and combed his hair back, flashing a dazzling smile. “I must be imagining things. Long day, you know.”

Val arched an eyebrow, and her skepticism radiated off her in waves. Her skepticism, Nyma’s weary confusion—and a smug satisfaction that seemed to come from the Blue Lion herself.

“What?” Coran breathed.

At the front of the cockpit, one of the holo displays flickered to life, the answer to Coran’s unasked question glowing in big, bold letters.

_**Adjunct.** _

Val let out a startled sound that began as a soft scream and ended in a delighted laugh. Her joy burned bright and steady in Coran’s chest, swelling until it chased his shock away. Nyma’s satisfaction was a quieter thing, but no less sure. Coran stared at them, and then at the screen, and even with all the pieces laid out before him, he couldn’t help feeling like he’d assembled them in a nonsensical order.

“The adjunct bond,” he whispered. “You want me?”

 _**You are already mine,** _ Blue typed on the screen. _**Took you long enough to realize.**_

Her words brought a smile to his lips—not only for what she was saying, but because he could so clearly hear her paladins in her words. Meri and Lance and Nyma and Val. They’d become a part of Blue, had shaped her. The lions had never spoken outside of the paladin bond before, and from everything Coran had heard, even within the bond they didn’t use true speech.

It seemed utterly fitting that the lion who had learned to speak from this particular team should have the same sass Meri had turned on him far too many times to count.

And _that_ was something he knew how to process. “Well excuse me,” he said, puffing himself up. “How was I supposed to know what was happening? There’s not exactly a handbook for this. _The Savvy Altean’s Guide to Adjunct Bonds._ Ha!”

Blue rumbled, and neither Val nor Nyma could tamp down on their amusement.

 _**Rules and contracts are Green’s thing,** _ Blue said. _**I don’t care about all that, and anyway, Meri and Lance never would have had anyone else as their adjunct. It was only a matter of time before these two felt the same. I didn’t see any reason to hurry things along.** _

Coran smiled, warmed through by her words. He felt Val and Nyma’s contentment with the bond, of course, as he’d been feeling their emotions all evening—as he’d been catching whispers, now that he thought about it, for quite some time. And if he focused, he could sense Meri and Lance somewhere out there in the universe. Both were concerned about their own missions, both a little lonely so far from their families.

Or maybe that was just his imagination. Hard to say.

“So it’s different for each of you, is it?” he asked, looking back to the holo screen.

_**Seems like it. Guess we’ll have to wait for Red to get her shit together to be sure, though, won’t we?** _

Coran gaped at the screen, unable to decide whether he was more scandalized by the Blue Lion swearing—or by her using a _human_ curse. It was hard to make his displeasure known, however, as Val’s laughter burst inside him like a sunburst.

“Wait,” Nyma said. “Red’s got someone in mind, then?”

Blue rumbled. _**Maybe…**_

“Blue!”

_**I can’t tell you. Red made me promise. She can’t do anything from Daibazaal, anyway, so it doesn’t matter.** _

Val’s curiosity had been piqued, and she peppered Blue with questions about Red’s adjunct, but Blue remained tight-lipped, her satisfaction pooling inside Coran like a glass of fine nunvill. He leaned back, letting the others’ emotions wash through him, and found for once that he was quite content with the hand he’d been dealt.

Support them--wasn’t that what Green had asked of Karen? Well. Coran could certainly do that.


	21. Roya Vosar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Hunk and Shay stayed on the Balmera to help rebuild after the Empire's latest attack while the other paladins returned to the summit. Pidge and Ryner are busy staging a breakout at TK157, where Sam was transferred shortly after his capture. Meanwhile Matt, Val, and Allura are off in search of the ancient Altean holy site called Oriande.

_It hurt._

_There was no name for this kind of pain. It kept oblivion at bay but consumed all waking thoughts, all possibility of action. He was trapped, hemmed in on all sides, but the prison itself was an afterthought. The ache kept him trapped as surely as any cell._

_Why? The question reverberated through his flickering consciousness, filtering up to him in every moment he had enough presence of mind to remember what had happened._

_What he’d lost._

_What had brought him here in the first place._

_These thoughts never lingered long enough to fester, which was probably for the best. He didn’t want to think about it. Thinking about it made it real, and if it was real, it meant he had to face unpleasant truths._

_Better to wallow in the pain as faces drifted in and out of his life, some familiar, some not. Two faces mattered more than most, and in the beginning he saw them everywhere. They filled his dreams, watched him from the shadows as others came to poke and prod at him._

_Then, eventually, they drifted out of his life and out of his dreams. It got easier not to think of them, or of their absence._

_It got easier to forget, and so he forgot._

_He tried so hard to forget…_

* * *

Matt woke with a start, an overwhelming ache in his chest blotting out the rest of the world. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even move. He lay rigid on his bunk in the back room of the shuttle, the darkness nearly absolute.

For a moment, he swore he saw a wash of red light at the edges of his vision.

Val’s laughter drifted to him through the wall, and Matt fell out of the remnants of his dream. He drew in a shuddering breath and lifted a hand to his face, which was slick with cold sweat.

“ _Vrekt,_ ” he whispered. It had been a long time since he’d last dreamed of his captivity. Months, probably. His dreams hadn’t always been pleasant during his training with Fligg, but when the nightmares came they tended to be vague, ominous things—fears about the future, echoes of his migraines, confused jumbles that felt more like the ordinary, nonsensical nightmares he’d had as a child.

This was something entirely new.

He pulled his hand away from his face and pressed the heel of his hand to his chest, where there was still a dull ache. In the dream, it felt as though something had been ripped out of his chest, and he was legitimately surprised not to find blood there now.

The pain had dulled, but it hadn’t left him entirely, and as he forced himself to stand and begin going about his day it became clear that this wasn’t a physical ache. It was something deeper—more akin to the ache of overextending his Quintessence than to a bruise or heartburn or anything of the sort. A memory, maybe? Except he didn’t remember feeling anything like this before.

He remained standing in the darkened crew quarters for a long moment after he’d finished dressing, absently massaging his chest. Something about the dream nagged at him, but both the dream and the unsettling sense of wrongness faded as he came more fully awake. Eventually he shook himself, putting the pain out of his mind as he went to join the others in the cockpit.

* * *

“Can I ask you a favor?”

Eli blinked a few times, his thoughts slow to release the video he was working on today. “A favor?” He frowned. He hadn’t talked to Carmen Mendoza much. Oh, they were friendly enough, and the Mendozas made a point of having Eli over for dinner on a regular basis. Some sort of _humans on an alien world_ solidarity. The invitations had only become more insistent now that Karen was off at the summit, as though Carmen, Marco, and Ramón had realized that Eli’s entire social life these last few months consisted of video calls to the castle and whatever Karen could drag him to on New Altea.

He appreciated the effort to make him feel welcome, really. He didn’t particularly _need_ the in-person interaction; he’d lived half his life through a camera’s lens or online, and the degree of separation had never really bothered him.

But he appreciated the thought.

So it wasn’t entirely unusual for Carmen to call him up. He’d assumed she wanted his opinion on something she was thinking of making the next time he came over, or maybe she wanted to invite him along on a family outing to a street fair or something. (Did New Altea even _have_ street fairs? Eli hadn’t spent enough time out in the city to know.)

A favor, though—that _was_ a surprise.

Carmen hummed, her long silence breaking Eli out of his work-induced fog entirely. He pushed his chair back from his desk and glanced at the clock. Getting late, and he still hadn’t made dinner.

Eli headed for the kitchen as Carmen gathered her thoughts. Akani would skin Eli alive if she realized he was having goo for dinner again. All the humans’ apartments had a food goo dispenser in the kitchen, between the stove and the temperature-regulated pantry, and Eli’s had seen more use than most.

At length, Carmen spoke again. “Do you need any help with those videos you’re making?”

Eli grabbed a bowl from the cupboard. “I didn’t realize you were into video editing.”

“I’m not,” Carmen said. “I was thinking Sebastian could help you. Or… you could teach him. If it’s not a bother.”

“It’s not, but… Where’s this coming from, all of a sudden? If you don’t mind me asking.”

Carmen hesitated. “I think it might do him some good,” she said slowly, clearly choosing her words. “You know how it is, not having anything to do all day. Or, well...”

“No, I get it,” Eli said. As the families of the paladins of Voltron—especially considering they were all far out of their depth on New Altea—Eli, Karen, and the Mendozas were provided with room and board, schooling for Luz and Mateo, and a small monthly stipend. It wasn’t lavish, but it ensured they didn’t need to work to cover the necessities.

That had been hard, especially for the Mendozas. Eli—and Karen, he suspected—rationalized it away as compensation for their work for the Coalition. The Mendozas weren’t directly involved in any of that, which must have made their stipend feel like blood money. Ramón had been hired on part-time by his kids’ school, where he helped with the youngest kids, Carmen worked as a florist in the nearby shopping district, and Marco took on odd jobs around the neighborhood to pass the time.

It was something to fill the day, and to distract from the snippets of news that filtered back to New Altea about the war. Sebastian, though, hadn’t found anything. He’d taken a few classes at the university, but at some point he’d stopped going. After that, he’d managed a few weeks stocking shelves at a grocery store. Eli still wasn’t sure if Sebastian had quit or had been fired, but he knew by now that asking after jobs, school, or ambitions was taboo in the Mendoza house.

“He still just watching the kids after school, then?” Eli asked as gently as he could.

Carmen sighed, the sound shaky like she was holding back tears. “He does. Ramón has been working later to give Sebastian more time with them. They help, I think. They aren’t so heavy with the news of the war as the rest of us. It helps him forget.”

“Yeah. And, look, I’m not opposed to having him over, but if you want to help him forget about the war, I might not be the best person to do that. All I _do_ is think about the war.”

“You’re at least human,” Carmen pointed out. She sounded small. “I think that’s why he’s having such a hard time. He has a whole stack of new books he wanted to read, but he’s barely touched them. Said he couldn’t get into them because it just reminded him he’s on an alien planet.”

“Ah.”

“I… I think I made a mistake taking him away from home.”

Eli’s heart twinged, and he set his bowl on the counter as he began to pace. “You did what you had to do to keep your family safe, Carmen. No one can blame you for that.” Carmen didn’t answer, and Eli suddenly wished his sisters were here. Lana and Akani had become fast friends with both the Mendoza women, but especially with Carmen. They would know better than Eli how to help her now.

He sighed.

“I’m more than happy to hang out with Sebastian,” he said. “If he’s up for learning some video editing, then that’s great. Just let me know when he wants to come over, and I’ll try to make sure I’m not working on any of the actual battle footage that day. Sound good?”

“Sounds very good,” Carmen said, audibly relieved. “Thank you, Eli. From the bottom of my heart.”

“It’s the least I can do.” Eli ended the call soon after that and, ignoring his empty bowl entirely, went back to his computer to see what he had to work with.

* * *

Shay returned home from the Meet, five days after returning to her Balmera, to find Hunk wrangling several younglings. Pei dangled from his neck, Len and Tesh clinging to his legs. Balmeran younglings were small in stature, but they were not light, and Hunk’s steps dragged as he chased after Rin, a girl of only two years who delighted in dodging Hunk’s (deliberately clumsy) bear hugs.

Stopping in the mouth of the tunnel, Shay smiled at the scene. How many times had she come home to see Rax much like this, fighting valiantly to keep his footing as the younglings leaped on his shoulders?

The thought brought with it a pang of sorrow, Shay’s throat constricting with all the things he might even now be suffering. But she had discovered something these last days as she spoke with the other Elders, tended to her parents, and returned, always, to Hunk’s smile and ready hugs.

Life went on.

Her grandmother’s death still ached, and she would not sleep well until she had her brother back—she understood that about Pidge and Matt and Nyma now. That restless drive. The need to always be in action. The mask Pidge wore might be cheerful or angry or sarcastic, but underneath, Shay suspected, was the same fear and guilt that now filled her.

Yet the pain and fear had begun to retreat. They did not disappear, but they pulled back, now and again, and she remembered how to smile. Tears snuck up on her at odd hours—when she found her grandmother’s favorite cane in her chamber, waiting for its owner to take it up once more, and again when the Balmera song struck a chord she could not place, except to know it made her think of her brother.

The joy was equally capricious, and Hunk more than anyone knew how to tease it out of her. Even now, thinking of her brother, she felt more fondness than sorrow. Hunk was that sort of man, she supposed. Whether through the paladin bond or by his own natural empathy, he always knew when she needed to laugh and when she needed to cry, sometimes before Shay herself did.

He paused now, looking up to find her there. She heard the gentle probe in his song—testing the air to sense Shay’s mood. He’d made no mention of hearing the song as Shay did, but he must have been aware of it on some level, for as soon as she responded, singing contentment, a smile burst across his face. He caught Rin easily, hoisting her over his shoulder, and shuffled over to Shay.

“Hey,” he said, hugging Shay with his one free arm—only for a moment, as Pei’s grip on his neck suddenly slipped, her weight pulling now on his throat. He wheezed, reaching behind himself to steady her, and smiled again at Shay. “How’d it go today?”

“Well,” she said. “They have agreed to speak with a team from Olkarion, though they make no promises beyond that.”

“It’s a start,” Hunk said, nodding firmly. The Elders’ reluctance still irked him, she knew, but he had adopted a stone-headed attitude, insisting that they would all see sense, sooner or later, and resolving to take all other pressures off her plate until then.

She loved him for that, and she caught his arm before he could pull away. Hunk tipped his head to the side, but Shay only sang affection and pressed her forehead to his for a moment before excusing herself to visit her parents before the evening meal.

“Okay!” Hunk said as she left. “Who wants to help me make dinner?”

The children all cheered, and Shay smiled into her hand, her steps lighter than she might have expected just a few short days ago.

Thank Balmera for Hunk. Shay would have been lost without him.

* * *

Fligg’s information led them to an ancient world called Roya Vosar. Allura had been here only once before, and had spent most of her time in the quaint village near which the castle-ship had set down. Her father and the paladins had been running some sort of training exercise in the area—tracking, she thought, though the details were fuzzy. Even then, Roya Vosar had been sparsely populated, the Vosar people having suffered from a series of plagues and famines in recent generations. Many of them had left in search of more hospitable planets, and many others had met a slow decline.

Allura remembered wondering why people would want to live among the ruins of their ancestors, where the whole world felt like the bones of a great, ancient beast.

She had more sympathy for them now.

“I’m not seeing any population centers on these scans,” Val said, swiping through several readouts. “Plenty of plant life and small animals. A few larger animals, some solitary, some moving in packs. Not much else.”

Allura’s heart sat heavy in her chest, but she plotted a course to the coordinates Fligg had given them. “I suspect the Vosar have long since abandoned this planet,” she said. “Even in my father’s time, most of the younger generation had already left. There weren’t enough Vosar of childbearing age to sustain the population beyond another century or so.”

“Maybe that’s why Zarkon’s never come here,” Matt said. He sat beside Allura in the copilot’s seat, though he’d been distracted since he woke up. The shuttle was considerably slower than the castle-ship, unable to open wormholes across such a great distance, and it had taken several days to reach Roya Vosar.

Fligg had warned them they would encounter no one in their search—Fligg had evidently been drawn to this place some years ago before they retired to Quom to await Allura and her friends. They had found nothing except a premonition that this would be the beginning of their quest for Oriande. Allura had been worried Zarkon may have remembered the old legends and begun his own quest for the ancient secrets of her people.

But Roya Vosar remained quiet as they approached, untamed wilderness stretching out beneath them. It reminded her of her first visit, and of Olkarion—wide swathes of unbroken forest, towering mountains in the distance. Here and there, eroded stone structures and tarnished metal struts rose from the greenery like Shiro’s memories of breaching whales.

Fligg’s coordinates brought them to a lone stone tower overgrown with ivy but surprisingly intact given its apparent age. Roya Vosar had never been a leader in technological development, but neither had it stagnated in an earlier age. Stone buildings outside of the ruins had been rare ten thousand years ago, and she would have expected even the newer constructions to have weathered away to rubble long before now.

“So… magic?” Val asked, peering out the viewscreen at the tower. “That or somebody’s been here _way_ more recently than ten thousand years.”

Matt pursed his lips. “Definitely magic.”

Allura had already unfastened her flight harness but paused before she stood, glancing Matt’s way. “Quintessence?” she asked, reaching out with her senses. It was possible the ship’s hull was dulling her perception, but she hadn’t sensed anything beyond the sleepy energy of the forest.

“Very faint,” Matt said. “But there’s definitely something worked into those blocks. Not currents of Quintessence so much as… I don’t know. It’s like an afterimage of whatever magic the builders worked here.”

Ancient magic, then. _Very_ ancient, if it were some sort of galactic signpost meant to direct pilgrims to Oriande. Once again, Allura wondered what exactly was hidden within that tower.

Allura was the first off the shuttle, though Edi bounded along at her heels, brimming with curious energy. Val and Matt followed behind, only slightly more subdued. They’d crushed a number of shrubs and small trees beneath their ship, creating a small clearing, but the forest between them and the tower was overgrown with brambles, and it took twenty minutes to work their way through—twenty minutes and a protracted argument with Matt about the merits of starting a forest fire to clear a path.

“Only a small one!” Matt said. “I’ll put it out when we’re done.”

Val laughed, Allura scowled, and Edi was already scrambling up into the lower branches to circumvent the problem all together.

They came at last to the base of the tower, where it quickly became apparent that this tower had no door. Or windows. Or any sign at all that it wasn’t a solid obelisk of stone.

“I could try placing myself inside,” Val said, tucking her hands under her arms as she craned her head back to look toward the top of the tower. “But I’m not sure I want to find out what happens if I show up inside a solid object.”

“Yeah, let’s not,” Matt said. He stepped up, running his hand along a stone block. “There’s some sort of pattern here, for sure. It’s not just that the whole thing is soaked in Quintessence.”

Edi frowned, her nose scrunching up as she did so. “It’s a puzzle?”

Val hummed. “Puzzles? Ruins? Supernatural shit? Anyone else starting to feel like Indiana Jones?”

Laughing, Matt cleared away some of the ivy growing along this section of the tower, leaving bare stone. “Just as long as we don’t find a snake pit under here. I don’t suppose anyone brought a sharpie along on this dig?”

“I’ve got lipstick,” Val offered.

Matt twisted, arching an eyebrow at her. “I don’t think you want me drawing on a dusty old stone tower with your makeup.”

Val grimaced. “I mean, I can sacrifice if it’s the only option.”

“We’ll see.” Allura stepped forward, laying her hand over Matt’s. “Trace these lines for me. Maybe I can make some sense of them.”

Matt shrugged and did as she said, tracing complex whorls and branching paths on the tower’s surface. Allura had been hoping for writing, or something else immediately recognizable, but whatever these lines were meant to represent eluded her.

Still, something about this place tugged at her. She felt as though she _ought_ to know what it was asking of her, like it should have been obvious. This wasn’t a puzzle you could pass if only you had the correct answer. It was more selective than that, attuned to those who had studied with a master of Pygnarat, or perhaps specifically to Alteans.

Curious, Allura tapped Matt’s hand. “Let me try something.”

He stepped back, leaving Allura alone beside the tower. She pressed her hand against the stone, reaching out with her Quintessence. It was as Matt had said—there wasn’t Quintessence in the stone, but there was an afterimage. An echo. Like channels had been worn into the stone by the passing of Quintessence long ago.

Allura poured her own Quintessence into those channels, which burst alight, tracing blue runes across the stone blocks. Edi gasped, and Matt and Val whispered, their voices buzzing around the edges of her awareness, but Allura paid them no mind. She continued to fill the tower with her Quintessence, following the channels across its surface until she had looped around completely, creating a single continuous circuit.

Something clicked, and suddenly a second source of Quintessence raced outward from within the tower— _beyond_ the tower—to supplement Allura’s own. She opened her eyes just in time to see the tower transform into a pillar of blue-white light.

“Woah,” Matt breathed. “I’d say you found something.”

“Not just anything,” Allura said, her head spinning. For a moment, as her Quintessence intermingled with the other, her awareness had stretched somewhere far beyond Roya Vosar. “A gateway. A gateway to Oriande.”

* * *

 

Hunk and Shay sat together atop Yellow’s head, watching the last traces of light fading at the horizon. The Balmera had passed close to this star, forcing everyone underground for the day, and Yellow was still scalding beneath Hunk’s touch. But as long as he took care not to brush up against the cooling metal with his bare hand, the heat was actually quite soothing.

The last few days had been nothing short of exhausting. Shay’s parents were getting better, if slowly, and the initial panic had mostly subsided. But Shay still spent most of every day with the other Elders, inching closer to an agreement on how best to protect their people, and she was still aching over Mir’s death and Rax’s kidnapping.

Hunk did what he could to alleviate her burdens—rebuilding where the Galra had destroyed homes and collapsed tunnels, taking care of the children who had been in Rax’s care while the other Balmerans tried to figure out a new routine. He even cooked for them sometimes, and if cave bug stew still made him feel a little green, he could at least now boast an ability to whip up no fewer than five Balmeran comfort foods.

Mostly, though, he stuck close to Shay, offering moral support and massages between meetings. They talked in the evenings about Balmeran traditions and the expectations of an Elder. Shay had been adamant from the start that she would not give up her bond with Hunk and Yellow, and if that meant abdicating her seat, so be it.

Hunk doubted it would come to that. The Elders weren’t happy with Shay’s insistence on leaving, but her family supported her almost without exception. If she didn’t want to step down—and more and more he thought she didn’t—then they would stand behind her. At worst, someone else from her family or one of the nearby Elders would take on her duties while she was away, and she would return when the war was over.

Shay wasn’t the only one teaching Hunk about life on the Balmera. In fact, there were some areas she kept conspicuously quiet about—but her parents and the rest of their family were more than willing to drop hints when Hunk was around. It was, apparently, quite rare for Elders to act alone. Sure, only one person technically held the position, but they almost always had a heart-mate—someone with whom they had declared Unity. The concept had mystified Hunk for the longest time, just offset enough from his concept of marriage that it never sat right when he tried to wrap his head around it. Then, a few nights ago, it had fallen into place, and he’d had to laugh at himself for not seeing it sooner.

Heart-mates weren’t spouses. Or—they might be. There was nothing to say that heart-mates couldn’t get married, or have kids together, or any of it. But that wasn’t what it meant to declare Unity. They were separate decisions, separate dimensions of the relationships in question.

He supposed, upon reflection, that the problem was quite simply that he’d never seen so much tradition built up specifically to recognize and celebrate queerplatonic relationships.

An Elder’s heart-mate, from what Hunk gathered, did essentially what Hunk was already doing for Shay: support them outside of the Elders’ circle and take the lead in the family when duties called the Elder away. Shay’s own words echoed endlessly in his head. _He is one with me._

They made his heart stop even now, and he fought the ridiculous urge to cry.

Hunk could only imagine that Shay hadn’t mentioned this in all their conversations about her new role because she didn’t want him to feel pressured into a Unity he didn’t want.

Except he did want it. He wanted to spend the rest of his life with Shay so much it surprised him, and the more time he spent with her people, the more he wanted to come _here_ after the war. Part of him was terrified at this realization, and not a little worried—what would his own family say? What about Lance and the others?

But it didn’t matter. Sitting here beside Shay, watching a star pass beyond the horizon, felt _right._ The thrum of the Balmera beneath his feet, the rasping calls of the Balmeran children as they played—he couldn’t imagine leaving it all behind for good.

Besides, as long as wormhole technology existed, living across the universe was really no worse a separation than living in another city.

“So I was talking with your parents today,” Hunk began, and immediately cringed at his own word choice. He wasn’t sure if Balmerans had a concept of asking parents’ blessing, but it had always felt a bit dated to him, and he didn’t want Shay to think he’d gone over her head.

Shay tilted her head to the side, her song changing, and changing Yellow’s song with it. “Oh?”

“Well, uh.” He tugged at his collar, feeling suddenly flushed. “I should say, they mentioned something to me, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Trying to find out as much as I could about it before I brought it up with you—or with anyone.”

She turned toward him now, probably picking up on his nerves. Her brow furrowed. “Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” Hunk said. “Better than fine—maybe—depending. No, wait. Let me start over.” He took a deep breath, turning sideways to face Shay, who straightened up, searching his face. “You know I care about you, right?”

Shay blinked. “Of course. We share a bond, Hunk. It would be difficult not to know how you feel, I think.”

“Then you know that, in so far as it’s my decision, I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” He faltered, pulse tripping over itself as Shay’s eyes went wide, her hand rising toward her mouth. “I know we’re young, and I know it’s the middle of a war, but I know myself, too, and I’m not going to change my mind.”

“Hunk...”

“I know this is sudden, and you don’t have to answer right now, I just--” Hunk reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, perfectly round piece of crystal as wide as two fingers. It shone with blue light, cloudy whorls within shining iridescent and a single shimmering band of golden flecks cutting through the core. “Everyone says you’re supposed to go to the Balmera when you think you’ve found your heart-mate, and she’ll give you a token if your intent is pure. I wasn’t honestly sure she’d even understand me, but...”

But she had. He’d hardly been able to focus when he went into that deep chamber. Self-conscious and not a little nervous, he’d tried three times to put it into words: how much he loved Shay, how he felt incomplete without her, how he wanted to see her smile and hear her laugh and hold her when she cried. How, more and more, when he thought about his life after the war, he pictured Shay beside him.

He’d often thought he could hear the echoes of the Balmera song. He caught fragments of it from time to time, chased melodies he could never remember for long.

Standing there in the heart of the Balmera, though, he’d heard more than echoes. For the first time he appreciated the depth and complexity of the music, the way it caught you up and carried you along. It hadn’t lasted long, but he knew beyond a doubt that the Balmera had heard him, and that she approved. The crystal that had grown from the wall beneath his fingertips had only cemented that knowledge.

He held it out to Shay now, his hand shaking until Shay caught it in both of hers.

“You don’t have to say yes. You don’t have to say anything if you need time to think about it. I just want you to know that I’m here.”

Shay took the crystal sphere from him, cradling it in her palms. The sun had disappeared by now, its light fading rapidly, and the crystal painted luminous designs across Shay’s face. “You don’t have to do this for me.”

“I’m doing it for _us,_ ” he said, pulling his hands back against his own chest to mask the way they trembled. “I mean… we’re already bonded through Yellow. This would be a different kind of bond, but you already know how I feel. This isn’t a temporary thing, Shay. You’re one of the most important people in my life, and doing something for you _is_ doing something for me.” He wet his lips, suddenly aware of the open sky above them and the silence all around. “Only if you want it, of course.”

She looked up at him, eyes shining. “I do.”

Hunk’s breath caught in his throat, and a slow grin burst across his face, his cheeks aching from the size of it. “Yeah?” he asked.

She nodded, then yelped as Hunk grabbed her and squeezed her to him, nerves cascading out of him in a torrent of laughter.

“Okay!” he said. “Okay, uh--” He pulled back, holding her still with a hand on either shoulder. She seemed shaken, but she was smiling too, her skin warm beneath Hunk’s touch. “I don’t know all the details of how this works. I was trying to be subtle about it, you know?” He wasn’t sure he’d _succeeded_ , but he’d figured he could at least not go around telling everything that he wanted to propose to Shay.

“It is a simple process,” she said, “but we will want our friends there.”

“Right, right.” Hunk sat bolt upright, a sudden thought occurring to him. “Right! I should tell my moms!”

Shay laughed as Hunk’s elation turned to horror—what _would_ his moms think about him asking Shay to be his heart-mate? He hadn’t exactly explained Unity to them as part of the whole alien experience.

But Shay had him by the hand, the crystal sphere warm and solid between their palms, and she pulled him toward the hatch atop Yellow’s head that took them into the cockpit. Hunk’s moms were still on the castle-ship, helping out with the summit, but they answered within a few seconds of Shay connecting to their private line.

Hunk’s tongue turned to lead, and he stared at his mothers, completely at a loss for words as their greeting took a sharp turn toward suspicion.

Then Shay squeezed his hand, and Hunk found his footing. He squeezed back, smiled at Shay, and faced his mothers.

“Mom. Mama. Shay and I have something to tell you.”

* * *

Pidge was more cautious on TK157 than they’d been at the last prison. They had backup again, and for all their scans had turned up half a dozen automated systems, it wasn’t really that well guarded. Pidge and Ryner probably could have handled in on their own; with two Guard squads--Tea Two and Ruton Five--there to run interference and get the prisoners to safety, this was a cakewalk.

Still, Pidge wasn’t going to let themself get distracted. Not after what had happened to Ryner last time, not with their dad’s life riding on this mission. Not with Shiro, Matt, and their mother all expecting them to come home in one piece.

It was maddening, but they pushed through. TK157 was a quiet world—a labor colony, but not one of the harshest Pidge had seen. Judging by the tech being shipped out of here and the tools available in the work rooms, these people had been brought here for their brains, and beating them within half an inch of their life didn’t exactly produce good results.

They’d never call this place nice, but the two day delay caused by the sudden arrival of a freighter and its guard force didn’t grate the way it might have in another situation. No one was going to die in two days, and Pidge kept a close eye on the hangars where the freighter’s crew loaded up crates full of tech just to make sure there were no prisoners being transferred with the rest of the haul.

Now, finally, they were in motion, safe in the knowledge that the freighter was long gone, and the remaining guard force just couldn’t stand up to a couple of paladins and a dozen members of the Voltron Guard.

They’d cleared the base in under twenty minutes, leaving Pidge and Ryner to man the control tower, Ryner monitoring for any guards they may have missed in their sweep, Pidge beginning to transfer records. The Guard started working their way through the cells, evacuating prisoners in waves.

Once the file transfer was running, Pidge moved to another station to bring up the prisoner records, checking the room and the security feeds at they did so. Ryner gave them a sympathetic look. “Still clear,” she said.

Pidge flushed, shifting their focus to the records. They searched their father’s prisoner ID, and the record popped up almost instantly. Species, sex, location of capture, date of capture, date of transfer in and origin point, date of transfer out and destination point.

They couldn’t quite stop the thud of disappointment, though they’d warned Shiro of exactly this. Their father had arrived on TK157 a little over two weeks after his capture and had stayed here for about six months before being transferred to a facility named Renxora. Pidge didn’t recognize the name or coordinates, but they sent both to Green so she could begin to plot a course.

“Bad news?” Ryner asked.

“Not good news.” Pidge closed out of the records and turned back to the file transfer. “They transferred him over a year ago, but we have the next destination, at least. Get these people back to the castle, fill Mom and Shiro in on what we found, then head out to do some recon at Renxora.”

They didn’t point out that six months before Voltron’s return was still well before Haggar would have had any reason to care about Pidge’s dad as leverage, which meant he was no more likely to be at Renxora than here at TK157. Complaining about it wouldn’t make the facts any less true, and Pidge was lucky to _have_ a direction.

It was just frustrating.

But they finished the file transfer, wiped the archives, and followed Ryner back to Green to escort the Guard ships as they took off, bearing over fifty newly-freed prisoners.

It wasn’t a waste. Never mind the wild goose chase for their dad; the mission hadn’t been for nothing. Pidge could at least take comfort in that.

* * *

“Sebastian!”

Luz’s voice rang out shrill across the playground, bringing a smile to Sebastian’s lips. He’d overslept again today, then spent another two hours alternately staring at the ceiling and playing dumb mobile games on his phone, and he’d barely had time to shower before sprinting out the door—but his cousins’ raw exuberance never failed to pull him out of his funk.

He spotted her perched atop one of the play structures and waved, his stomach only doing a minor flip when he realized how high off the ground she was. New Altea had a very unique perspective on playground safety, and Sebastian still wasn’t convinced Luz and Mateo weren’t demonstrably more prone to broken bones and concussions than their classmates.

There had been no major incidents so far, though, and Luz had always had impeccable balance—no less now as she hurried across a high arching bridge barely wide enough for her feet, then hopped on a zip line that brought her to the ground much nearer the gate. She made it three steps before she remembered that her brother was still lost somewhere in the throng of students waiting for their parents or maybe just soaking up some sunlight and thrills before they threw themselves into homework.

Luz spun on her heel, throwing up a spray of small, brightly colored rubbery pellets that cushioned the ground beneath the play structures, and planted both hands on her hips. “ _Mateo!_ ” she shrieked, loud enough to silence several groups playing nearby.

Sebastian pressed a hand to his face and closed the remaining distance between them, placing a hand on Luz’s head before she repeated herself. She tipped her head back, pouting.

“I _told_ him you’d be here soon.”

“Thanks,” Sebastian said. “Do you see him?”

She pointed, and Sebastian followed the gesture to the field beyond the playground, where Mateo and a dozen others were playing soccer. A version of soccer, anyway. New Altea didn’t have the right ball or goals, and the kids seemed to have invented half their rules from scratch, but it was still the same underlying principles.

Sebastian nudged Luz’s shoulder to get her moving, and the two of them skirted the edges of the playground to reach Mateo and his friends. Luz huffed twice more on the way over, as though Mateo’s distraction were a personal affront, and Sebastian found himself biting down on a laugh at her expense.

To his credit, Mateo bowed out of the game as soon as he spotted Sebastian and Luz.

“ _Finally,_ ” Luz said as Mateo jogged over.

Mateo rolled his eyes and tugged on Luz’s ponytail. “Don’t be a brat, Luz.”

She smacked his hand away, and he slapped back, grinning a trollish grin. Sebastian sighed and inserted himself between them, looping an arm around both their shoulders and turning them back toward the street.

“So,” he said, falling into a staggering synchronized step with Luz while Mateo groaned and tried to pull away. “What did you learn today? Orbital dynamics? Wormhole history? Classical Quiznugnian literature?”

“That’s not a thing,” Mateo said.

Sebastian raised an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”

Mateo hesitated, and Sebastian laughed. Mateo shoved him in the side, knocking him into Luz, who shrieked and latched onto Sebastian’s arm. “You’re so _weird_ ,” Mateo complained.

“I try. Seriously, though. Any fun new alien facts to share?”

“King Groggery the Infirm lived to be four hundred and twenty-two,” Luz said promptly. “He died young.”

Sebastian nodded, not quite sure how to respond to that. “Cool.”

Mateo snorted. “Yeah? Well it took eighty thousand people seventy-nine decaphoebs to build the planetary ring system.”

“Holy shit.”

Luz let out a scandalized _Oooooh_ as Mateo laughed in delight. Sebastian grimaced, but he was well past the point of caring if his uncle lectured him (again) about swearing in front of his cousins. It was basically a lost cause at this point, and Luz was still far too prim to adopt his habits. (Mateo, on the other hand… Well, he had a whole slew of new curses to try out, most of which the adults didn’t recognize yet, so the occasional _shit_ was really nothing to stress over.)

They spent the rest of the walk home like that, Luz and Mateo competing to see who could spout the best bit of trivia. It never ceased to amaze Sebastian how much they’d learned in half a year. Sure, they had little portable translators, but they’d both learned to read Altean without the clunky text-to-speech-to-translator process, and recently they’d become fluent enough that they’d started teaching their classes a little bit of English.

And that wasn’t even touching on what they were actually supposed to be studying. There was the usual—history and literature were the same across planets, aside from the specifics, and neither of them had reached too much advanced science or mathematics yet, though the fundamentals they _were_ learning looked very little like the math and science Sebastian knew.

It was the health classes and tech workshops that really boggled Sebastian’s mind.

“You _built_ a hoverboard,” Sebastian said, frowning at Mateo. The kid was way too good at lying; Sebastian couldn’t for the life of him figure out whether or not this was a joke.

Mateo shrugged, the magnitude of his statement apparently lost on him. “It didn’t _work._ But I think that’s just because I didn’t attach the second lurvum right. I could’ve fixed it if Mrs. Ernok had given me a few more vargas.”

Sebastian stared at the top of Mateo’s head, then shook his head. He wondered if this was how his parents felt when he and Val talked about the latest technology. If so, he suddenly felt the need to apologize for sounding like he’d stepped out of a Dr. Seuss book.

The house wasn’t far away, but Sebastian had managed to tease a summary of homework assignments out of both Luz and Mateo by the time they arrived. They made it though about half before the lure of video games became too strong, and Sebastian—already bored out of his mind and teetering on the edge of an all-too-familiar lethargy—was easy to sway.

It was only two hours later, when Sebastian heard Tío Ramón punching in the door code, that he remembered he was supposed to be the responsible one.

“Hey!” Sebastian called, wincing as his character walked off a cliff. “We’re in the living room. Just… taking a quick break from homework.”

Luz giggled, but Mateo (thankfully) was too focused on the game to offer his own commentary. Sebastian propped his elbow up on the back of his floaty chair and glanced toward the door, already spinning excuses, but his words fled at the sight of Eli Kahale standing beside his uncle and parents.

“Oh,” Sebastian said. “Hey. I totally forgot it was family dinner night.”

His mother waved her hand, the nervous energy behind the gesture doing nothing for Sebastian’s knotted stomach. “We moved it up this week.”

Sebastian blinked. “Okay. Uh. Need help in the kitchen?”

“I think we’ve got it,” Tío Ramón said. “I think Eli could use some help, though.”

Eli gave a start, and Sebastian’s mother glared at him, which made Eli blush, clear his throat, and flash a smile Sebastian’s way. “That’s right. You know anything about video editing?”

“No…?”

“Perfect.”

Right. That wasn’t suspicious at all. But Tío Ramón was already herding Luz and Mateo into the kitchen so he could keep an eye on them while they finished their homework, and Sebastian’s parents were taking the groceries that way. He felt the sudden urge to retreat to his room, where he didn’t have to deal with people or with the inevitable crash that came after an afternoon with his cousins.

(Maybe crash was too strong a word. It was more like the omnipresent hollowness that had consumed Sebatian’s life these past few months could only be held at bay in short bursts, and as soon as he didn’t have to hold things together for his cousins’ sake, he lost his grip.)

But Eli had pulled up a second chair beside him at the dining room table, his laptop already up and running. Sebastian shot one last, longing look at the hallway that led to the bedrooms, then reluctantly took a seat beside Eli, who launched into an explanation of the software that flew completely over Sebastian’s head.

It was interesting enough, he supposed. There was just so much to remember that Sebastian kept mixing it up in his head, and he still couldn’t see what the point was. Eli had been doing fine with these videos on his own so far, and there had to be a billion other, more qualified people he could go to for help if he really needed it. Especially considering Sebastian hardly lasted twenty minutes before Eli’s words began to slip him by, his mind spiraling through job applications and Val’s latest message and a hundred other tiny little obligations that sapped his strength day by day.

This was a familiar pattern, but the blur of passing months hadn’t taught him how to combat it. He was always tired these days, falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon and screwing up his chances for a good night’s rest, then dragging until mid-afternoon the next day. He had mountains of books he wanted to read, Altean soap operas Val said were hilarious, an entire planet out there to explore—but most days he could barely muster the energy to shower.

God. Lance and Val were out there saving entire planets, and what did Sebastian do with his time? Play dumb cell phone games and occasionally watch the ten- and twelve-year-olds who had their shit together better than he did.

(Wait? Ten and twelve? Or had Mateo had his birthday already? Had _both_ of them? Sebastian thought he remembered a party or two, but they got lost in the long slog of empty days.)

Thinking of Val and Lance only made the hollowness inside him yawn wider. How many times had they gotten hurt in the last six months, he wondered? How many times had they stared their own death in the face? Sebastian had made the mistake of asking the holograms in the castle about it once, back before his family had moved to New Altea.

_What’s it mean to be a paladin?_

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to hear. Tales of glory, maybe, or stories of the lives they’d saved. Instead, he’d received the brutal truth.

 _It’s hard,_ the woman who looked like the princess had said. _And it’s tiring. But it’s worth it._

 _You meet lots of new people,_ the Galra woman had added. _It’s worth it just for them. Just to know you made life better for one person, one family._

 _But it’s dangerous?_ Sebastian had pressed. A peculiar fear had gripped him in those days. He’d told himself he was afraid for his sister, who had already been scarred by this war, even before she took up the armor of a paladin.

The other Altean woman, the one in red armor, had sighed, her eyes sad. _It is. That’s what it means to be a paladin—to face danger so others don’t have to. So_ you _don’t have to._

That was just it, though, wasn’t it? Val and the others were all out there risking their lives, while Sebastian’s biggest worry was whether or not he was going to get an interview for that clerk position he'd applied for three days ago.

Eli was like the paladins: he had a place in this war. In the world of aliens and ancient empires and grand quests for justice. Not everyone was meant to do something so big—that’s what the holograms had been saying, even if they couched it in pretty words. There was no shame in it. It was just the way things were.

Sebastian just wished he didn’t feel like he was the only one out of his entire family that didn’t belong here.

* * *

Hunk, of course, wanted to tell everyone. Shay could not blame him—not after the joyful tears that had answered their announcement to his mothers. Lana had screamed in delight, and Akani had disappeared from view almost at once to begin packing, shouting her congratulations from off screen. They had quickly gone to speak to Coran and the other paladins to see if someone could bring them to Shay’s Balmera to celebrate.

(Hunk had asked, too, that they not tell the others the reason for the celebration, as he wanted to break the news himself.)

Shay felt herself become giddy together with Hunk, the weight of the past days lifting for a moment as the truth of this decision sunk in.

She and Hunk were to declare Unity.

Shay’s parents were their next stop, both because they were near and because Shay herself could not keep her joy out of the Balmera song. Her family had already begun to pick up on her mood, and curiosity pricked at her mind as she bid farewell to Hunk’s mothers.

Both Shay’s parents were awake when she arrived with Hunk, her mother smiling and speaking softly with one of the healers, her father sipping cavebug broth. He had finally awoken two days ago, Nyma’s portable healer having fixed all but some bruising and the fractured bone in his wrist. Shay’s heart swelled to see them both awake and alert—and her mother looking almost as though nothing at all had happened.

Her father looked up, blinking slowly as he noticed Shay standing there with Hunk, who had turned suddenly bashful. Questions filtered into the song, drawing the attention of the others in the room, and Shay’s pulse quickened.

Taking Hunk by the hand, she came forward, heat suffusing her skin as she searched for the right way to tell them.

“Hunk has suggested Unity,” she blurted, a nervous giggle bubbling out of her.

The news burst into the song, carried by her parents’ shock and elation, and Shay beamed as it rippled outward, new little hiccups and trills joining the symphony as others realized what had happened.

“Shay,” her mother said. Only that. The syllable contained whole archives, the song even more. Pride and joy and a bittersweet twinge as she realized Shay had grown up out there among the stars.

Her father sat in silence a moment longer, then quietly set his bowl aside and stretched out his good hand toward Hunk. “ _Avunt._ Come here.”

“Uh...” Hunk glanced at Shay, then cautiously stepped forward, grabbing her father’s hand. “What’s--?”

Her father broke into a grin and pulled Hunk into a hug, thumping him on the back. “You are a good one. I am glad my daughter found you.”

Hunk blushed, and Shay felt as though her core had been filled with the warm light of crystals.

“When will you declare?” her father asked, pulling back far enough to look to Shay.

“I know not,” Shay said. “We have only just told you and Hunk’s mothers. They are coming here now to meet you.”

“I kind of want the others to be here,” Hunk said. “I don’t know if that’s possible with the war and everything, but we should at least see, right?"

Shay nodded. “A few days to talk to everyone,” she said, “and then we shall see.” She didn’t want to wait long, to be honest. She would declare today if she could. But she understood Hunk’s desire, and after all they hadn’t yet talked about when. A few days, perhaps a few weeks to prepare themselves and to invite the others here—that was not so long to wait.

Still, a restless energy burned in her, and it was not long before she grabbed Hunk once more by the wrist and towed him away, back to the Yellow Lion to contact the others.

Here, finally, her exuberance faltered. Hunk tried first to contact Lance, but he didn’t answer. Hunk waved it off, saying he was probably sleeping, but she could see the worry in him as he checked the time converter on the comms unit. They called the castle next to talk to those who were there, and then Pidge and Ryner, who were out looking into a lead on Pidge’s father, and sent an encrypted message to Meri. But when they tried to contact Allura, Matt, and Val, they once more received no answer.

“Give it a while,” Hunk said, nodding emphatically. “They’ll call back in the morning. We don’t even know where Allura and them _are_ right now.”

Shay rubbed his arm, humming comfort, and though she could feel the anxiety pulling at him, it was not quite enough to ruin her mood.

“I have been thinking,” she said by way of distraction. Hunk turned to her, a question in his eyes. “My people once were more connected, our culture linked across all the Balmera. Grandmother Mir...” She hesitated, just for a moment, the ache returning to her, and smiled as Hunk’s anxiety evaporated in the wake of his sympathy. “Grandmother Mir used to speak of the Migration. Balmera once would roam in groups, both to mate and to guard their young.”

“To guard them?” Hunk asked.

Shay nodded. “Against predators, invaders, and the dangers of the universe. Our Balmera is weak after what the Galra put her through, but she has begun to recover. In time, she may be able to protect herself. This, I think, is what the Elders have been waiting for. A way to guard ourselves as our people once did.”

“Do you think that would work?”

“Not in my lifetime,” Shay said. “Generations of suffering will not heal overnight. But perhaps if we found the other Balmera…”

Hunk’s head snapped up, and she felt him following the thought to its end. The Galra Empire had conquered many Balmera in its reign, mining them for the crystals they used to power their ships. Some of them had died, and many others were still beneath Zarkon’s thumb, but surely there were some that had not been conquered. Surely somewhere, there were free Balmera, Balmera who had fled beyond Zarkon’s reach.

“Shay, that’s a great idea!”

Shay lifted her head, smiling shyly. “You think so?”

“Yeah! I’ll bet Pidge has some information on other captive Balmera we could free, or some idea how to find any who are still out there hiding. We could free the ones who need to be freed, search for the other ones—it’s the perfect way for you to--”

He stopped himself, but Shay knew he was thinking much as she herself was. She was Elder now, however much she wished it were otherwise. It did not make her any less a paladin, but it meant she had responsibilities to her people as well as to the universe. She had struggled these last days to figure out how to balance these two duties, and she thought this might be the answer. A way to serve her home and to aid the Coalition at the same time.

“Perhaps I should bring this to a Meet,” she said slowly. “But I would need something more than a dream to give them.”

“Then let’s find something,” Hunk said. “We’ve got a little while before my moms get here, anyway, right?”

Shay nodded, anticipation bubbling in her chest as Hunk pinged Pidge again, asking if they had any information on other Balmera. What would it be like, to meet others of her people? Would they have other stories than what few Shay’s family had kept? Would they remember how to navigate? Would they still hold the culture that had been stripped from her own people?

She hardly dared to dream of it, but still her hands shook as Pidge sent files over and she and Hunk began their search.

* * *

The summit was exhausting. More exhausting than the months Karen had spent preparing the treaty currently being ripped apart by the delegates, more exhausting than training with Antok. It was the third day of talks, and they’d begun to make progress. Most of the delegates agreed with most of the points in Karen’s treaty, but just when she’d begun to think they were in the home stretch, they had come to the part where the delegates began to push for new clauses to be added.

It wouldn’t be so frustrating if these suggestions weren’t all so contradictory and downright excessive. Jikora wanted to set up some kind of priority system that, in practice, would force Voltron to act as a kind of private security force for them. Liyijia kept trying to minimize the required contributions to the Coalition—despite there _already_ being a clause that let planets petition for reductions on an individual basis based on the state of their infrastructure, economy, and reconstruction efforts.

Shiro had called an afternoon recess, and Karen couldn't get out of the summit hall fast enough. She needed a change in scenery, or she was going to end up punching someone in the nose.

Her mind first turned toward Pidge, who had left early that morning to scope out their next lead. Maybe they’d had some kind of luck. (Except, no. Karen had barely considered that before she knew it to be false. Pidge and Ryner were still doing reconnaissance, and it would probably be another few days before they made their move.)

The knowledge slowed Karen’s steps for a moment, but she recovered quickly and continued on her way. She’d noticed the adjunct bond progressing in recent weeks, slowly at first, and then in a rush when she’d come back into contact with the Green Lion. What had started as simple awareness of Pidge being alive had become a sense for when they were in danger, and now she found that she hardly had to think of them to know, at least in broad strokes, what they were doing.

Stranger still, this progression seemed largely one-sided. Pidge had mentioned several times having a newfound awareness of Karen in the bond, and had sensed low-level danger that seemed to correspond to Karen’s more intense training sessions with Keena. But they’d become no more aware than that.

That was the point of the adjunct bond, Karen suspected. The bond itself didn’t do much for the paladins; that was up to Karen. Her intuitive knowledge was simply meant as a tool to aid her, as Coran’s empathy was meant to aid him. As… as…

Karen wrenched her mind back from that dead-end track with a sigh. Two of the other lions had begun the process of bonding an adjunct, but it was too early, and they guarded their secrets too closely, for Karen to name the nascent adjuncts. She recognized the feeling though, now that Coran had cemented his bond. She’d been feeling as though a name were on the tip of her tongue for months now, and two days ago it had presented itself to her, quite suddenly, as she joined Lana, Akani, and Rosario for dinner.

It was still tempting to chase those secrets, to try to parse out who the other adjuncts were going to be, but she knew it was futile, so she busied herself with other tasks. With the summit, with tracking Pidge and Ryner’s process. With trying to guess when Coran was going to work up the courage to tell her about his bond. She wasn’t sure if it was the summit that had made him hold his tongue thus far, or if he was still wary of her after their early friction, but she’d decided to give him until the end of the week before she found a way to corner him and press for details of his bond.

She was a little lost, after all, and even if the adjunct bond was something entirely new, Coran still understood the paladins far better than Karen did. She hoped together they might be able to figure out what the lions meant them to do.

But for now: distraction. Karen spotted Keena across the plaza and veered toward her. There was still something about the woman that set off alarm bells inside Karen’s head, but she was a familiar face, and she wasn’t going to try to talk politics right now. Hopefully.

“Keena!” Karen called, raising a hand to catch Keena’s eye. The woman turned, but she didn’t look Karen’s way. Instead, she frowned at something across the crowded plaza out front of the summit building. The area was packed with attendants and advisers waiting for their delegates, with Tava merchants and cooks trying to sell food, drinks, and various small luxuries: hats to ward off the sun, cushions and hovering seats like stools without legs, silk scarves and little drones Karen knew without needing to be told connected to the summit building’s AV system. The drones had very limited functionality, so as not to compromise the security of the venue, but they provided visual and audio feeds on the speakers for those who struggled to follow the talks.

Karen eyed that particular stand with distrust. She suspected Pidge could have found a way to make a drone like that far more useful than the Tava intended.

It was difficult to say what had caught Keena’s eye along the side of the plaza, whether a stall or a delegate or something else, but Karen quickened her pace to follow. To her surprise, Keena continued on past the edge of the plaza, leaving the crowds behind. She didn’t appear to be following anyone, but she walked with a purpose that said she knew exactly where she was going, though Karen didn’t recognize this portion of the city. There were hotels here—accommodations for the delegates?

Keena disappeared inside one such hotel, and Karen hurried after her, now more curious than ever. Was she meeting with the delegates behind closed doors? Was she spying on them? Karen didn’t know, but she didn’t like it.

“Hello and welcome to the Glittering Sireel!”

Karen stopped in her tracks as a Tava in a crimson uniform intercepted her. He was smiling, falling over himself with a dozen little bows as he asked Karen if there was anything he could do to help. She declined as politely as she could, scanning the lobby for signs of Keena, but the Tava noticed.

“Looking for someone, then? I can help you with that, if you’ll just step over to the counter here. Do you know what room your friend is staying in?”

Karen pulled away from the man’s hand, gut twisting with the sudden thought that Keena might have told him to delay her. (That was absurd, though, wasn’t it? Surely Karen was just being paranoid. And yet…)

One last look around the lobby confirmed that Keena was long gone, and Karen scowled. She bid the Tava man farewell and retreated outside, lurking across the street for as long as she dared in case Keena returned that way.

She didn’t, though. Not before Karen had to leave to get back to the summit hall for the afternoon session. Questions plagued her the whole way back, but she’d learned at least one thing today. Keena was up to something.

* * *

Allura stepped up toward the tower, its brilliant white light shimmering in her hair. Val shivered, glancing around the clearing, which looked surreal, the light washing the forest of color and painting deep shadows between the leaves. “What’s _happening_?”

“Oriande,” Allura breathed. “It must be.”

Edi let out a soft keening sound, her ears pressing back against her skull. “I don’t like this...”

Val glanced to Matt, and then to Edi, who took a step back from the tower, trembling. “It’s fine, Edi,” Val said, dropping to one knee. “Master Fligg sent us here, remember? This place was built by the Alteans.”

“Besides, Allura would known if something was wrong, right?” Matt stepped toward the tower, lifting one hand toward the wall of white.

Allura shook herself, seeming to come out of a trance. She turned, catching each gaze in turn. “This _is_ what we came here to find. I’m sure of it. I’m going through, but none of you has to come with me.”

Matt squared his shoulders at once. “Like hell I’m staying behind.”

A very large part of Val wanted to say the same. Oriande and its secrets plucked at her, tugging her forward, and she knew she would regret it if she shied away from this moment. More than that, it would kill her to sit here, wondering what had happened to Matt and Allura, until they returned—or didn’t.

But one look at Edi put Val’s own opinions on the back burner. She took Edi by the shoulders, waiting until she turned away from the gate to speak.

“What do you think? I’ll stay here with you if you want.”

Edi’s eyes widened. “But… you wanted to go to Oriande.”

“So did you.” Val shrugged, forcing a smile so Edi wouldn’t see her internal conflict. “Maybe there’s something else in the forest around here. We could go exploring.” She tried to make it sound enticing, but it fell flat, and Edi clearly noticed.

“No,” she said, huffing a shallow breath. “I want to go.”

Val hesitated. “You’re not just saying that for my sake, are you?”

Edi’s jaw jutted out, and she stared defiantly up at Val. “No. Watch.” Turning, she stalked toward the tower. Her ears still lay back, but she didn’t break stride as she neared the wall of light, raised a hand, and cautiously reached into the gate.

She vanished in a flash of light so bright it drew a pained gasp from Matt, who reached out to steady himself on a nearby tree. “Well I guess that settles it,” he said. “On three?”

“On three.” Val straightened, heart pounding as she glanced at the others. “One, two--”

Matt was moving before Val even reached three, charging into the light, and Val sighed toward the canopy.

Allura laughed, grabbed Val’s hand, and pulled her forward. “Three,” she said.

They plunged together into the light, and for a long while, Val couldn’t make sense of anything. It was like bilocation, almost. Something pulled at her, stretching her Quintessence thin, and she strained to keep herself together. She lost track of her body, tumbling end over end through a sea of white, and had only a moment to feel sorry for Matt before she crashed down into ice cold water.

She came up spluttering, the cold seeping into her bones, and pushed her hair out of her face, blinking furiously to clear her vision. A current pulled at her, sweeping her downstream, and she waited only until she picked out a broad stripe of green and brown before she set off at an angle, cutting toward the bank and hauling herself up and out of the water.

“Allura?” she gasped, teeth chattering as a chill wind swept over her bare arms. Only the wind and birdsong answered her, and she staggered to her feet, turning to search the river for signs of her friends. “Allura! Matt! Edi!”

No answer.

Val’s heart pounded, and she staggered downstream, calling their names over and over, heedless of the way her knees shook, each step a battle just to keep from collapsing in the soft dirt of the riverbank.

_Val?_

The voice drifted to her on the wind—or maybe it _was_ the wind, and her ears were making patterns out of white nose. She froze anyway, closing her eyes to listen. Nothing. Or… something?

She opened her eyes, and her throat closed up. There on the horizon, the very tip just poking above the tops of the trees, was the tower--no longer glowing. The gate to Oriande, which she’d stepped through moments before. No. She turned, heart in her throat, and finally looked at the forest around her. Familiar trees, but unlike any she’d seen on Earth or Olkarion or Quom. Thick underbrush, flashes of bright colors where birds darted among the branches. The air had a peculiar quality to it, buzzing like lightning hung in the air waiting to strike, but there was no mistaking this forest.

She was still on Roya Vosar—and she was alone.


	22. Mirrored Sky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Shiro, Akira, Coran, and Kolivan have been running the summit with help from Karen and Nyma. Despite the attack on Shay's Balmera and a cryptic message about Rolo from the mysterious Delegate, the summit has gone relatively smoothly. On the third day of talks, Karen spotted Keena sneaking away from the summit hall toward the hotels where the delegations have been staying, but Karen lost the trail before she could find out what Keena was up to. Oh, and Coran is now the blue adjunct.
> 
> Meanwhile in her search for information on Vindication and Retribution, Meri made contact with Ulaz, a part-Atlean Galra surgeon working undercover in the Imperial Medical Corps. Lance, Keith, and Thace are being held by the rebellion on the Galra homeworld, who consider them enemies because of Keith's and Thace's history with the Empire. Team Hogwarts found a tower Allura suspects to be a gateway to Oriande on Roya Vosar, but after passing through, Val found herself back on Roya Vosar, alone, on the bank of a river. Hunk and Shay are on Shay's Balmera with both their parents, planning their Unity, and the Greens are off following their newest lead on Sam.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Misgendering during the second scene, sort of. (Meri never introduced herself properly to Ulaz, and Ulaz uses he/him when referring to her.)
> 
> Pervasive flashbacks, dissociation, and other effects of PTSD through most of the later scenes, starting from, "That singular thought dominated Shiro’s mind." You can jump back in at, "Akira’s heart was in his throat."

“Cyndar supports us,” Akira said. “Consul Tykkar blusters, but when it comes right down to it, they need us to legitimize their rule, and we aren’t asking anything they can’t afford to give.”

“Yeah, but Nuru and Lytalla aren’t convinced,” Shiro pointed out. “They were hit hard, but they’re relatively stable as they are. All they need from us is protection in case Zarkon returns—which he probably won’t, but we’d go back if he did. They just don’t have any reason to risk their own necks right now.”

Coran listened with half an ear as the discussion continued, his mind a million miles away. It had been two days since his bond with the Blue Lion had crystallized, and his awareness of his paladins was only growing sharper.

His awareness of them, and his awareness of the absence where Val should have been.

“By our best count, half of the worlds represented here who were not already sworn to the Coalition are likely to ratify the treaty,” Kolivan said, a rumble in his throat betraying his dissatisfaction. “Some portion of the remainder might be swayed by personal visits and additional incentives.”

“And the other, like, fifty are too big of cowards to take a stand,” Nyma said. Her irritation, sharpened by worry for Rolo and resentment of the mysterious Delegate who had delivered news of him, snagged Coran’s attention and dragged it back to the here and now.

It was the morning of the summit’s final day, during which Coran and the others would have only a few hours to make their final pleas to the delegates before they all began to scatter back to their homeworlds. The summit had been moderately successful, with perhaps eighty of the one hundred and fifty delegates having already pledged their support of the Coalition, but it was not quite the triumph Shiro had been hoping for. Thus the early morning conference between the coalition leaders. Shiro, Akira, Nyma, and Coran were here as the core of the castle’s staff, joined by Kolivan and by Karen, who seemed nearly as distracted as Coran. He wondered if that had to do with her own bond to the Green Lion.

He wondered if she would be receptive to talking about it, once the summit wound down. Their bonds weren’t very much alike, but Coran suspected they shared a common foundation, and so any similarities they might unearth could go a long way toward illuminating the exact situation they’d found themselves entangled in.

It was a consideration for later. Just now Coran couldn’t afford the distraction, and Karen was wound so tight Coran didn’t want to push her into a conversation she might not want to have.

“Is there anything we can do today?” Karen asked. “On a large scale, I mean. There are a few delegates who might be swayed, but most of them seem to have dug in their heels—or at least, they’ve decided not to decide.”

Shiro blew out a long breath, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m not sure, but we should at least talk to them. If we can figure out what their concerns are, specifically, that will at least put us in a better position for any future talks we might arrange, even if we can’t change their minds today.”

“They may simply need time,” Kolivan added. “The Coalition is young. Many of these planets have never known a rebellion to survive.”

“Rebellions don’t survive because they don’t have _support_ ,” Nyma hissed. “If these people want us to make any headway in this war, they need to realize we can’t do everything alone. They need to find some _vrekking_ backbone and offer more than kind thoughts and empty gestures of goodwill.”

Coran’s throat grew tight with borrowed grief—a weight that was easier to bear now that he knew it wasn’t his own heart that was aching. He caught Nyma’s eyes and smiled. “I know how frustrating this all must seem, but we’re in a better spot now than we’ve ever been before. If some of these people haven’t realized that yet, we’ll just have to show them what-for, eh?”

Nyma scoffed, but the slope of her shoulders eased minutely, the knot in her core unwinding a fraction at a time. She wasn’t used to relying on other people, but she was trying. She _was_ , and Coran wouldn’t fault her if she felt she had to take it slow.

“Coran’s right,” Shiro said. “Our focus today needs to be on evaluating where we stand with the people who aren’t likely to ratify the treaty as-is. The next few months are going to involve speaking to those who are willing to engage in further discussion, reaching out to others after some time has passed and we’ve proven that the Coalition actually stands a chance. Hell, maybe Allura can win some of them over. Some of these people probably don’t want to look like they’re bowing to anyone but royalty.”

“Good _God_ ,” Karen muttered. “Are you serious?”

Kolivan affirmed Shiro’s assessment, but Coran’s mind had wandered again at the mention of Allura. He’d tried to contact her after the summit yesterday, his concerns about Val solidifying as he had some time to explore his newfound abilities. He’d hoped there would be some clear-cut answer for her silence on the other end of the bond. Perhaps she had learned shielding magic of some sort, or perhaps their search for Oriande had taken them somewhere beyond Coran’s senses.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t been able to reach Allura last night, nor this morning when he’d tried again. He reached out now, just to assure himself that his ability still worked. Nyma was close enough, and her frustration loud enough, that Coran would have had to work not to feel her, but Lance swam into focus soon enough, bursting with unease and a fierce protectiveness that Coran found intimately familiar.

Meri surfaced more slowly, her emotions diffuse and lethargic. That sparked Coran’s concern in its own way, but he’d sent her a message last night, and there was nothing more he could do on that front until she got in touch with him.

He stretched further, closing his eyes and feeling for Val the way he would feel for Quintessence in the air, but she simply wasn’t there.

“Coran? You okay?”

Coran opened his eyes, startled to find the room empty except for Shiro, who stood by the door, his face deeply lined. For an instant Coran thought he could feel Shiro’s fatigue the same way he felt Meri’s, but it was a fleeting illusion born of a far more mundane empathy.

“No need to worry about me,” Coran said brightly. “Just thinking.”

“That looks like some pretty heavy thinking. Anything I can help with?”

Coran couldn’t help but smile at Shiro’s offer—as if there weren’t enough people out there clamoring for his help without him offering it to Coran. “It’s nothing urgent. Just thinking about our next step.” He hesitated, keeping his tone carefully light when he continued. “Have you talked to Allura recently? Any word on her search?”

Shiro winced. “I haven’t called her since the summit started, to be honest. By the time I make it home each night I just want to sleep.”

“Can’t blame you there.” Coran clapped him on the back. “I’ll give her a call this afternoon. Just curious if she knows when she might be heading back. I didn’t want to jump on her if you’d already asked—you understand. She might take it as incentive to abandon her search.”

Shiro’s lips twitched, and he squeezed Coran’s arm. “I know _exactly_ what you mean. We’re coming up on the week they’d agreed on, right? So she’ll probably be calling us soon to give us an update, anyway.” His smile slipped, just for a moment, and he glanced toward the door. “Is it selfish of me to hope she’s coming back?”

“Not at all,” Coran said. “Allura and Matt are both very important to you. No one would fault you for missing them, even under better circumstances, and we can all use Allura’s help with the politics. It’s one of the many things she excels at.”

“You’re no pushover yourself, Coran. Don’t think I haven’t seen you out there charming our guests.”

Coran flushed, laughing at the notion. “I am charming; I’ll give you that,” he said with a grin. “But I’m not much of a politician. Lealle and I always helped Alfor where we could, but all we really did was play host. Make nice with visiting dignitaries to help the negotiations run smoother. Alfor and Zarkon handled all the real business. Keturah, too, when she could be bothered.

“You’re a lot like Keturah in that way, actually. Politics may not come naturally to you, but you can learn the rules and keep pace with those who were raised to it. But I wouldn’t have wanted to face a conference of allies without Alfor, and I can’t imagine it’s easy for you without Allura.”

“It’s not,” Shiro admitted. “But we all have to do what we have to do.”

Coran smoothed his mustache, considering Shiro’s slumped posture for a moment. “Can I tell you something I once told Allura?”

Shiro blinked, seemingly surprised by the question. “Sure, I guess. Go ahead.”

“Don’t measure yourself by the people who won’t listen to you.”

“I… I’m sorry?”

Coran smiled, grabbing Shiro by the shoulders. “It’s the nature of politics that people are going to disagree over the most trivial of distinctions—and quite emphatically, too. You and Allura, you strive for unity. Discord in the ranks bothers you both. That’s a noble ambition, and it’s part of what makes you both such capable black paladins, but in the world of politics, it’s going to ruin you. Accept that some people are going to fight you, and focus instead on being the best leader you can be for the ones who want to join the Coalition.”

Shiro tilted his head to the side, thoughtful. “That’s sound advice, Coran. Thanks.”

He nodded, standing a little taller than before, and Coran gave him a bracing smile. Sound advice, indeed. He hoped it served Shiro well, as it seemed, so far, to have served Allura. As it might have served Alfor, if only Coran hadn’t been so slow to recognize the mounting strain.

 _This is a new generation,_ he told himself. Not a replacement for what he’d lost, but perhaps a chance for redemption. And by the ancients, he would give them everything he had to offer.

* * *

It was often said that agents of the Accords gave up something to do their work. Some fragment of their soul, some moral barricade most other sentient beings had where they drew their lines in the sand, as it were. To do the things you had to do under the banner of the Accords, you had to crush that piece of yourself, or simply never have had it to begin with.

Ulaz didn’t know which kind of monster he was. On New Altea, he’d never faced the impossible decisions that were his life now, but then, he’d always felt as though he were living his life inside a cryopod, a layer of ice insulating him from the real world. New Altea was simple, and it tried so hard to by idyllic.

But it wasn’t, and the rest of the universe even less so.

The higher-ups hadn’t though he’d survive this life. How could a surgeon, a man who’d spent years learning to heal, force himself into the mold of a monster, they’d wondered?

What they should have asked was how a doctor could keep his eyes on the patient before him while the universe rotted around him.

No, Ulaz didn’t know if he’d always been the sort of man who would kill one innocent to save a hundred, but by the time that choice was laid before him, he had already become the very model of a Medical Corps surgeon. He had done horrible things; he knew that. He had sacrificed his own innocence before any other, and he knew there was nothing waiting for him beyond the end of the war, even if he survived that long.

He was a knife in the hand of the Accords. An unfeeling tool with a single purpose: to cut to the heart of Haggar’s secrets, destroying whatever and whoever he had to to get there.

Then the Altean showed up, with helpless rage burning beneath his skin, burning through the Galra mask he wore. Like a trip wire in Ulaz’s path, that encounter had wrenched him off-course. Ulaz had sunk a decade into this mission, perfecting his technique, spouting excuses for what small mercies he could show to the prisoners under his care and silently justifying the horrors he could not spare them. He had risen in the ranks not quickly, but unerringly, and in a few years more he might even have reached Haggar’s inner circle where, at last, he might bring the entire machine crashing down on itself.

Excuses and justification. If that wasn’t his entire life. Do good where he could, and excuse it with lies dressed up in military rhetoric. Do harm where he must, and justify it as serving the greater good.

On any other day, he would have let the Altean impale himself on Haggar’s far-reaching claws. He told himself he’d intervened because one Altean getting captured put them all at risk, and on a good day, he might even believe that.

The truth was messier than that.

The truth was, Ulaz had seen an anger and a self-loathing in the Altean he recognized in himself. Ulaz had long since funneled that rage into the mission, becoming the monster he’d seen in himself, accepting the worst parts of himself, and using it to do something noble, if not exactly _good._

The Altean still fought, and there was a piece of Ulaz that wondered if that wasn’t the nobler choice.

Perhaps that was why he broke with routine today. For years, it had been the same story: carry out the experiments he was told to. Don’t let himself look his patients in the eye. Keep his head down and do whatever it took to reach a position of power, where he could help more than the one or two suffering right in front of him.

Change was in the air tonight, and Ulaz feared the time for the long con was at an end. So for the first time in nearly a decade, he ended his shift early, silently wishing the prisoners a restful night’s sleep for as long as this respite lasted.

Then he locked himself away in the records room, combing the database for mentions of Vindication and Retribution. The Altean had sent him more details on both, but the information was sparse. A suggestion that they had begun in earnest about seven lunar cycles ago, a promise that Haggar had taken a personal interest in them both.

Perhaps that was what had piqued his interest. Haggar was Zarkon’s right hand, the second most powerful individual in the entire Empire. Perhaps _the_ most powerful individual, considering the rumors of her influence over Zarkon himself. Anything she oversaw was bad news, but those few projects that captured her personal attention were nightmares given form.

References to these projects were veiled at best, but after some hours, Ulaz managed to locate the archived listings for both, from when Haggar had been recruiting druids and medical staff.

A single glance told Ulaz he had no hope of inserting himself into the Retribution team; it was nearly all druids, and those few positions that didn’t require supernatural talents had to do with the handling of large predators. An extension of Project Robeast, perhaps, using natural hunters as the basis, rather than prisoners reduced to base instinct by experimentation and torture.

Vindication, though—there Ulaz found a glimmer of hope. There were calls for druids here, as well, along with technicians and experts in Quintessence, but a large portion of the staff detailed in this early posting were medics, surgeons, and xenologists.

Ambition. It had been the core of Ulaz’s life since he left New Altea behind. It had been a constant in his life, driving him ever upward in Haggar’s ranks. This would be a lateral move, if not a demotion, in the grand scheme of things, likely taking him to some remote base far from Haggar’s seat of power.

But it just might be the move the universe needed him to make.

* * *

Within the first ten minutes of the day’s session, Shiro’s smile was frozen on his face. It had been a long, painful week, full of stubborn politicians, people trying to tease out an extra few promises, people trying to undermine the significance of the work Shiro had done. He’d started today hoping to build a few more bridges with the more reticent delegates, but by the time the assembly finalized the treaty and they broke apart for more private conversations, Shiro was ready to kick everyone through a wormhole and be done with it.

He forced himself to stay, though, because this whole thing had been his idea, and because he was stubborn, plain and simple.

Didn’t mean he wasn’t taking frequent detours to the bathroom, garden, and little cafe out front, where he could scowl into his not-actually-coffee and mutter all the things he couldn’t say to the delegates’ faces.

He survived, mostly, by scanning the crowd for Keena. Karen had shared her concerns, along with the fact that she’d seen Keena disappear into one of the hotels that housed the delegations, but neither of them had been able to corner her since.

It was just another thing to worry about, but at least with Keena Shiro didn’t have to worry too much about offending her. He just wished he knew whether or not he could trust her. Was she making backroom deals to shore up the Coalition? Or was she forming her own circle to further her own agenda? If it was the first, should Shiro pursue the matter? Or was it better to turn a blind eye? Support for the treaty was sorely needed, and uncovering uncomfortable truths might mean undoing much of the work he’d accomplished this week.

This was politics, he told himself. However much it rankled him, he would never get rid of corruption, bribes, and personal agendas.

(But was that any reason not to try?)

A headache had lodged itself behind his right eye by the time he finished his coffee, and he rubbed his forehead on the way back inside. The representatives from Nuru and Lytalla were still waiting to talk to him, and then he had a luncheon with Kevx, Renjor, and Vyon. Coran would have begun sending people home by then, so Shiro would make his way back to the castle-ship to see the delegations off, making a solid last impression where he could.

It was almost over. Three more hours, tops. Plus all the send-offs, which could take the rest of the night.

“Ah, Paladin Shiro!”

Shiro’s smile snapped back into place, and he raised a hand as Wurlia, the delegate from Nuru, flagged him down. She didn’t seem put out by having to wait, thankfully, though Shiro was at the point where he had to expect he would miss some of the intricacies of the dance.

“Delegate Wurlia,” Shiro said with a shallow bow. “Thank you for waiting.”

“Of course! After all the trouble you’ve gone to to organize these talks, the least I can do is practice my patience.” She gave a chiming laugh, raising one spindly hand to her mouth. There was something in her face that reminded Shiro of a spider—the fangs, yes, but also the gaunt cheeks below bulbous eyes. The Nuru were perfectly courteous people, of course, but Shiro couldn’t help feeling unnerved around them. “Really,” Wurlia went on. “You’re doing good work here. You should be proud.”

“And yet you refuse to join us yourself,” Shiro said. It was, perhaps, a little more blunt than his usual approach, but time and patience were precious commodities today, and Shiro wasn’t going to dance around the issue any more than he had to.

Wurlia glanced to one of her attendants, her fingers plucking at the short, coarse hairs—more like quills than human hair—that framed her face. “We haven’t said no,” she pointed out.

 _Which is the only reason I’m talking to you right now,_ Shiro thought, shoving the vitriol down where it wouldn’t spoil his smile. “No,” he said. “You’ve been very careful to give no indication where you might come down on the question of alliance.”

“We need more time to think. It is good that the Coalition exists, of course. To support the more vulnerable planets and coordinate those with real military strength. But for the rest of us?” Wurlia sighed, folding her hands at her waist. “I like you, Paladin Shiro, so I will be frank. Nuru isn’t so important that Zarkon will try to reclaim us before other targets—not so long as we don’t draw his fury by allying with the paladins of Voltron. We have the means to fend off a small offensive, but the extended campaign you’re proposing would ruin us. I won’t deny that the Coalition has much to offer, but it doesn’t come without costs. We will need to consider whether those costs outweigh the benefits.”

“Of course.” Shiro inclined his head, weariness gathering in his bones. “Is there anything else you need from me, then? Anything I can do to make you feel more secure in the Coalition?”

“Survive,” Wurlia said. “The longer this Coalition stands, the more it distances itself from the rebellions that have come and gone before you.”

As conditions went, that one was easy enough to fulfill, and in a couple of days, Shiro might even be grateful for that. Right now, though, it rankled. He’d been a paladin for nine months; he’d been promoting the Coalition for nearly seven. And still they told him to wait.

“Well. Thank you for your honesty, Madam Delegate. Perhaps we can speak again in a few weeks, after--”

Alarm jolted down his spine, cutting short his train of thought an instant before his comms crackled to life, Zelka’s voice sharp and breathless. “Paladins! Guard! We have a hostile incoming. Possible robeast. It’s headed for Eltava.”

Shiro’s fatigue vanished in a flash, flooded out by a surge of adrenaline, and he barely remembered Wurlia before he turned to go.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This is an emergency. Stay inside.”

Fear flashed across her face, but Shiro was already gone. He didn’t have time to comfort a frightened delegate, or to explain his haste to people who called out as he passed. The Black Lion was approaching fast, her worry the same one that had flooded Shiro’s system an instant before Zelka’s call. Shiro burst out into sunlight, dodging his way through the crowd as he caught sight of Black in the sky.

“Everyone, inside!”

Shiro turned, surprised to see Karen standing on a park bench, her hands cupped around her mouth. Most of the crowd had turned the opposite direction as the Blue Lion hovered over the plaza, people hastily making room for her to land. Only a handful of delegates turned Karen’s way, and they made no move to get to shelter.

“Do as she says!” Shiro roared, his voice startling a larger ring of people, who turned first toward Shiro, and then toward Karen, who nodded her thanks and began directing people into the summit hall. It had its own defensive grid—most of Eltava did. Shiro wasn’t sure if it had ever suffered a test on par with a robeast, but it would mitigate the worst of the damage.

Black touched down in the space Blue vacated, and Shiro charged up the ramp, keenly aware that he wore his dress uniform rather than his armor. It made him feel exposed, though if this was a robeast, he wouldn’t be leaving the cockpit.

There was nothing for it now but to make do, so Shiro strapped himself in, already taking to the sky. Blue was ahead of him, joining the battle raging far overhead. Blazing streaks from the castle-ship’s canons and smaller bursts of color from the Guard ships outlined the shape of the beast, but something about it didn’t feel right.

“Just the one?” Layeni asked. Her squad, together with Akira’s own fighter, was a short distance ahead of Shiro, though Black was gaining on them. The seven of them were only a quarter of the troops assigned to the summit; the others would have stayed on the ground, helping Karen get the delegations to safety and preparing a secondary line of defense, in case the Empire tried to sneak a ground assault by undetected.

“Zelka was right,” Akira said. “It’s gotta be a robeast.”

Nyma’s breath caught, the sound raising the hairs along the back of Shiro’s neck. “What the…?”

“Something wrong?” Shiro asked, but he had a feeling he already knew the answer. Black thrummed with unease that bordered on outright terror, and Shiro’s chest tightened as they drew near the battle.

Before Nyma had a chance to answer, Shiro was there, his eyes sliding over the shape of the beast, which was painted an unreal black—so deep it absorbed the light from the lasers and still appeared as little more than a ripple in the backdrop of stars. It took a moment for Shiro to discern the shape of it—four legs tipped in wicked claws, two eyes glowing with magenta light, a segmented tail whose tip glowed for a moment before it loosed a shot.

A Lion.

And just as he had during the battle for Earth, Shiro could sense the mind within the other lion—focused, malicious intent brushing up against the fringes of the paladin bond.

“Zarkon.”

* * *

“I need your help.”

Meri crossed her arms, sneaking a glance at Dez, whose expression betrayed nothing. Ulaz, on the screen, was equally impassive. Meri’s own gut was churning, but she had enough practice shaping her face to make a good showing as a proper spy.

“Our help,” Dez said. “That’s unlike you.”

Meri raised an eyebrow, glancing between Dez and Ulaz. There seemed to be some history there, though Meri couldn’t tell what it was. They both knew Thace well enough for him to point Meri specifically to the two of them, but Meri had never heard Dez mention Ulaz. Hell, when Dez had called Meri to her office shortly after first mark this morning, the last thing she’d been expecting was an encrypted message from Ulaz asking them to call him at a specified time on a specified frequency.

The three of them were silent for a long moment, Meri trying to figure out the unspoken dynamics at work here. The Accords rarely used video communications, if ever. Encrypted text transmissions were safer, easier, and faster—but Dez’s office was protected every way to Sunday, and evidently Ulaz had similar precautions in place on his end. Or else whatever favor he had to ask them was important enough to risk discovery.

“You asked me to look into a few things for you,” Ulaz said, notably leaving out any specifics. “I did, and I think I have an in.”

Dez glanced sharply at Meri, suspicion simmering in her gaze. Meri had relayed an abbreviated version of events upon her return from the research lab, saying only that she’d made touch with another agent and that he would keep an eye out.

If Dez thought Meri had asked Ulaz to get inside Vindication and Retribution, though, she was sorely mistaken.

“Are you sure?” Meri asked.

“Reasonably.” Ulaz glanced to the side, either checking to be sure he was still alone or more nervous than he let on. “But I worry that putting in a request myself will raise suspicions.”

Dez arched an eyebrow. “You want me to recommend you.”

“Yes.”

“To Haggar’s own personal project.”

“Yes.”

Blowing out a long breath, Dez combed her hand through her hair. “I’m afraid you may have an inflated opinion of my sphere of influence. Unless Prorok happens to have a vested interest in this project, I don’t see how I can help.”

Something sparked in Meri’s gut—a sharp, urgent desire to take a risk. If Ulaz could plant himself _inside_ one of these projects—if they could glean first-hand accounts of Haggar’s plan—wasn’t any risk worth that payoff?

“You’re saying we need someone in Haggar’s inner circle.”

Dez’s shoulders hiked up. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “And no.”

Meri held up her hands, plans already circling in her mind. Okay, so she would have to be careful, but if anyone could pull this off, wasn’t it her? “I’m not doing anything yet,” she said. “I’m just going to… look into some things. If we find another way, we find another way.” She glanced to Ulaz, who seemed troubled. “You don’t think we’ll find another way, do you?”

“No,” Ulaz said. “But I agree. You getting close to Haggar is not the answer.”

Meri shrugged, but they all knew the facts. Meri going to Haggar—even just getting a minor posting on her command ship—was no different than Ulaz infiltrating Vindication or Retribution. It was a risk. But everything they did was risky.

Dez and Ulaz would see that, in the end.

* * *

Zarkon was here.

That singular thought dominated Shiro’s mind as he spun through the battle, hardly hearing the other voices on the comms. Zarkon was here, flying a twisted copy of the Black Lion. Shiro didn’t know how he’d found out about the summit—whether through the spy, or whether one of the delegates had betrayed them.

It didn’t matter. Zarkon was here, his thoughts flickering on the edge of Shiro’s awareness like the flash of sunlight off glass, and Shiro didn’t even have Allura behind him to steady him.

And Black.

The Black Lion fought Shiro at every turn, the bond eerily quiet. Maybe it was Shiro’s own mind, too alive with panic to catch her thoughts. Maybe Black herself had gone quiet. Either way, their flying was clumsy, their attacks too slow to hit their target. Shiro tried to regroup with Nyma, only to have Zarkon’s lion force them apart with rapid-fire bursts of plasma from its mouth.

“ _Vrekt_ ,” Nyma muttered. “This isn’t working.”

“None of our shots are getting through,” Akira added.

Shiro’s heart clenched. A lion. Not a Voltron lion, not truly, but Zarkon would know Black’s capacity better than anyone. He wouldn’t settle for an inferior copy. And this model would be an improvement over the one he’d used in the battle for Earth—it had to be, and that lion had ripped Voltron apart. Ordinary ships just weren’t going to be able to stand up to this thing.

“Get clear,” Shiro said, his voice as blank as the bond.

Akira’s line was silent for a moment, and then he cursed. “I’m not letting you fight this thing alone, Takashi.”

“This _thing_ is Zarkon himself.” Shiro’s breath stuttered as those eyes bored into him and Zarkon’s presence stretched out his claws. _Move,_ Shiro thought, gripping Black’s controls so hard his knuckles ached. They stalled for a moment, and the next laser clipped her hindquarters. “Snipe it from a distance if you can, but your fighters are outclassed here. It does us no good to put your men in danger for no reason.”

That quieted him, as Shiro knew it would. Akira cared little for his own safety, but he knew his responsibility to the rest of the Guard.

“Fine,” Akira said. “Form a perimeter. Keep an eye out for any backup Zarkon might have in the area.”

Shiro nodded, sweat sliding down his neck as he reversed his momentum, lining up a charge on the false Black Lion as Zarkon turned his attention toward the retreating Guard ships. He didn’t know how much good this would do, but it was a chance, and Shiro wasn’t going to play this battle defensively. The only way was to hit hard and fast, to scare Zarkon off before he got the upper hand. Two lions together should be enough—shouldn’t it? Shiro breathed in, quieted his mind, and thrust forward.

The Black Lion balked, a roar of white noise like radio interference sweeping through Shiro’s mind. His vision whited out for a moment, and he floundered, panic clawing at his throat as something slammed bodily into him.

_**Away!** _

Shiro gave a start as Black’s voice thundered into the silence.

 _**Away,** _ she repeated. _**It is not safe to close with Zarkon. He knows the bond too well. He can use it.** _

_And if we keep running, we’ll never beat him,_ Shiro argued. His vision cleared and he found himself fleeing the battle, Zarkon’s lion close behind. Shiro pulled back hard on the controls, trying to turn them around, but Black resisted.

“He’s too strong,” Nyma said. Her lasers splashed across the false lion’s back in waves of blue, but Zarkon hardly slowed. “Shit. We need the others.”

Shiro blinked, trying to clear the panic from his mind—Black’s panic along with his own. Reluctantly, he let Black lead for a moment as he fumbled with the comms. “I’ll call them,” he said, “but Keith won’t be able to get here quickly, and I don’t know about Pidge and Ryner.”

“Some is better than none,” Nyma pointed out.

Shiro grimaced, then sent out an emergency call to the other three lions and prayed for the best.

"Shiro.” Wyn’s voice came on the line, tremulous and hoarse, and Shiro heard Coran mutter a curse. “I can… I can fight him. Like I did before.”

“Absolutely not,” Coran said. “The last time almost killed you!”

“But--”

“Coran’s right, Wyn,” Shiro said. “We can hold out for now, and Zarkon’s not going after anyone else. Let’s see if the others are able to make it before we put you in that position.” And he hoped to the heavens the others came, because he had no intention of making Wyn tangle with Zarkon again, however much it had saved his ass before.

 _Hold,_ he urged Black. _We just have to hold until the others get here._

* * *

The guards returned for Keith, Lance, and Thace hours later. There were no clocks or windows in the holding cell, but it had to be close to dawn. Arel was conspicuous in his absence, and the guards who did show up offered no explanation beyond a simple, "The boss wants to see you." They went, reluctant though Keith was to trust this. Lance's hand in his calmed him, and they stuck close as they traipsed through winding corridors. Three minutes out, ice washed through Keith’s core, a wildfire following on its heels.

He slowed, growling at the rebel guard who reached for his gun, and extended his thoughts toward Red. Something was wrong. Something with the others? She was too far away for him to glean any specifics, but the way his heart was pounding, his teeth on edge like someone had cranked his holographic mask up past its highest setting—that couldn’t be nothing.

“What’s wrong?” Lance asked.

Keith shook his head. “I don’t know. Something with Red.”

Lance sucked in a breath, his fingers closing around Keith’s wrist. “The others?”

“Maybe?” Keith screwed his eyes shut, fighting off the urge to summon his bayard and end this game with the rebels. (He was pretty sure he could summon his bayard, if he tried hard enough. As long as Red was close enough to reach him, it should work—and he was anxious enough to _make_ it work even if it shouldn’t have.)

The rebels were getting antsy by now, so Keith let Lance get him moving again. Red’s unease simmered inside of him, quickening his pace until the rebels had to hustle to keep up. If they really were taking them to talk to their boss, Keith wanted to get it over with. If the rebels didn’t want to work with them, they didn’t have to work with them. After six months of nothing, Keith was just about ready to throw in the towel and get back to his friends.

Thace had picked up on Keith’s mood by now, his gaze a silent, electric pressure on the side of Keith’s head.

“How much further?” Keith demanded.

The rebels glanced at each other, but said nothing, and Keith opened his mouth to ask again, but Lance squeezed his wrist, silencing him.

His breath hitched again, faint images pressing against his mind—lasers, shouting voices. Shiro, for just a moment, his face gaunt in the eerie lighting of Black’s cockpit. The flash of a knife.

“ _Vrekt_ ,” Keith hissed, tripping over his own feet. His head pounded, his breath coming in short bursts, and the corridor around him dissolved in patches of black fuzz. “Lance--”

“In here.”

Keith thought it was the rebel who had tackled him in the cafe who spoke, but he’d taken a step out of his body, and all he could do was watch as he was led into a small, dark room. Guards lined the walls, some armed with pistols, others with swords. The woman directly across the room from them carried no weapons, but she bore enough cybernetic augmentations that it probably didn’t matter. A cybernetic eye, a mechanical arm, a port on the side of her head—and Keith could only guess what else might be covered by her clothes.

“Nezai,” she said. Her voice sounded like sandpaper, rumbling with amusement. “You’ll have to forgive the rude welcome.”

Lance’s face said he wasn’t in a particularly forgiving mood, but just when he opened his mouth, Keith’s vision… _fuzzed._

_For a moment, he stood somewhere else. A hangar—the same he’d seen countless times on countless Imperial ships. A particle barrier shimmered in the air around him. Red’s. He knew that at once, as he felt her presence behind him, the same restlessness and agitation that had been hammering against him for the past few minutes._

“ _Red?” Keith called. “Red, are you okay?”_

_She gave no response, no indication that she’d even heard him. The black hole in his chest suddenly lurched, and he spun to find Zarkon standing with one hand pressed to the barrier._

“ _Why?” he asked. “You were built to obey the paladins. You were built to obey_ me _. Why do you still resist?”_

 _Keith bared his teeth, hand reaching for a knife that wasn’t there, and he positioned himself between Zarkon and Red, though he doubted he was here in any real sense. This was--when_ was _this? This must have been before Matt came and took Red back from Zarkon. But why? Why was he seeing this? Why now?_

 _Zarkon backed away and Haggar approached with a handful of druids, who spaced themselves evenly around the barrier, hands raised and crackling with energy._ “ _Obey,” Zarkon growled._

_Red didn’t move, but in the bond she shied away, bracing for the pain she’d come to know too well._

“--afraid there’s been a misunderstanding.” Thace’s voice was carefully neutral, his posture almost aggressively relaxed. “It’s true that Keith and I were raised within the Galra Empire, but you seem to be working off outdated information. We’ve both defected, and have been working against Zarkon quite openly for some time.”

“Yeah!” Lance said. “They’ve got frickin’ bounties on their heads like you wouldn’t believe.”

Thace closed his eyes, sighing heavily, and Keith felt a distant urge to do the same. The rebel leader’s lips quirked upward.

“Bounties? You don’t say. You know, we could use some cash around here.”

Lance curled his hands into fists at his side--when had he let go of Keith's wrist? When had he moved so far away? Keith couldn't remember. "Now hold on just a second. You can't--"

_Stone underfoot, spindly trees with rock-like bark. The stars overhead glittered bright in the darkness. There was no other light source that he could see, but everything seemed to glow with a violet light. He couldn't feel Red this time, but there was another presence, one he felt he should have recognized. Voices faded in and out of his awareness._

“ _...you would do that? For me?”_

“ _You’re one of my best friends.”_

“ _But he’s your husband.”_

_"Alfor doesn't own me, Zarkon. I'm a paladin first. If you tell me my husband needs to be stopped, then..." The speaker drew in a shuddering breath, and for a moment, Keith saw her, brown eyes shining with tears. She firmed her jaw and nodded. "Then we'll stop him. Together."_

“The furless one _does_ have a point.”

“Furless!” Lance squawked. “That's rude.”

The rebel leader grinned, her cybernetic eye glowing brighter. “I think I like you. And it’s as you said. We can always steal resources. Skilled allies are a much rarer find.”

Something had shifted in the room, some quality to the conversation. Even the guards had relaxed their watch, though all still held weapons at the ready. Keith’s head pounded, and he couldn’t parse together what he might have missed. Had they worked something out? How long had Keith been gone? He was still standing, by some miracle, though Thace’s proximity said he’d noticed something amiss.

"Keith."

"I'm fine. Just--"

_A flash of red._

_He stood at the edge of a field of lava, though the heat didn’t touch him. Mist rolled in behind him. Mist, or maybe steam._

_Ahead lay nothing but fire._

“ _Keith?”_

_Keith turned, his pounding heart skipping a beat as the world, for a second, seemed to steady. “Matt.”_

_He wavered, and then Matt was there, hands beneath Keith’s elbows to steady him. His left eye glowed an unnatural blue, jarring against the warm tones of… wherever this was._

“ _Keith, what’s wrong?”_

“ _I don’t know.” Keith shook his head, trying desperately to get things to fall into line. “I… We were on the homeworld. The rebels were taking us to see their leader. Then Red—she—vrekt. I don’t know. Something happened. She seemed… scared? Everything gets muddy after that.”_

_Matt frowned, shifting sideways so he had an arm around Keith’s back. “It’s okay, Keith. We’ll figure this out. We’ll--”_

The world fuzzed again, fading to black, to blue, to a strange and silky white. Then someone else was holding him, a broken voice whispering in his ear.

“ _We can save her. We can still save her. Please--”_

* * *

Shiro swore, spinning between lasers. Something was definitely wrong with Black—maybe it was being this close to Zarkon. Maybe Zarkon himself was trying to seize control of her. Shiro still only heard her voice in fits and starts, and he felt as though he were flying a freighter rather than a machine built to make the skies her own.

Zarkon dogged his every move, hedging him in with laser blasts and waves of something cold and dark that lit Black’s mind up with terror every time they connected. Shiro didn’t know what that energy was, whether the product of Haggar’s witchcraft or a weaponized form of the paladin bond, and he couldn’t get his thoughts in line enough to puzzle it out. All he could focus on was Zarkon and the pressing awareness that he could not let Zarkon win.

 _You are mine,_ Zarkon’s voice whispered in Shiro’s ear. _Why fight it?_

Black’s screens flickered for a moment as Zarkon yanked her mind toward him, and Shiro dug in, clinging to Black as she roared in pain.

 _You can’t have her,_ he thought, forming the words into a lance that he hurled Zarkon’s way. _She’s not yours. She was never yours._

Zarkon’s laugh chilled him to the bone. Black shifted—either of her own volition or under Zarkon’s control; Shiro couldn’t say. All he knew was that he had done nothing, and the powerlessness, the sudden reminder that he was not in control here, wrapped around his lungs like a metal fist squeezing the air out of him. He froze, trying to remind himself how to breathe, fear and dark memories tangling together in his head.

Then he took his panic, compacted it, fashioned it into a weapon of the mind that he used to seize control of the bond, and _pulled._

The light changed.

The battle vanished.

He still sat in the cockpit, but he was no longer in the air over Eltava. He couldn’t sense the false Lion, couldn’t feel Zarkon pressing at his mind. He didn’t see Blue or the Guard or the castle-ship. The comms were as silent as the far reaches of space.

A foreign world sat before him, and though Shiro couldn’t put a name to it, he thought he’d seen it before. City lights sparkled in the darkness.

“We must make an example of them.”

It was Zarkon’s voice that spoke, and it speared Shiro through. So cold. Calculating. Shiro saw his intention— _Black_ saw his intention and balked, horror creeping through her circuits. She had not always agreed with Zarkon’s decisions, but she had not thought him capable of this.

She had not thought her chosen capable of slaughter.

 _**No,** _ she said. _**This is not right.** _

Zarkon ignored her, taking hold of their bond in an iron fist and turning them toward the planet below. The chill in Black’s core spread, but she didn’t fight back. Not yet. It didn’t feel real. It couldn’t _be_ real. They were the head of Voltron, defenders of peace in the universe. They did not turn their might on civilians.

When Zarkon squeezed the trigger, at first, Black did not resist. She watched, apart from herself, as her own weapons ignited the atmosphere, burning a blackened scar into the heart of a city. She watched as Zarkon smiled, as distress beacons and emergency sirens lit up the airwaves like fireworks.

On the second attack, she fought. She wrenched the bond away from Zarkon, took back the power she’d given him. She saw his mind, saw what had brought him here, and she realized she should have stopped him long ago.

She would stop him now.

But her resistance only fanned the flames of Zarkon’s rage. He closed his eyes, sinking deeper into the bond. For decades he had flown her, spoken with her, become one with her. He knew the paladin bond better and more deeply than any before him—and he knew how to twist it to his advantage.

He tightened his hold on her controls, his mind twining around the bond and wrenching it from her grasp. Then he turned back to the helpless planet below, smiling as the first defenders rose into the sky, and opened fire. Black roared, agony racing along her conduits with every blast. She clawed at him, tore at the bond, tried to unseat him, but he would not yield. He was no longer her paladin, an equal, her chosen.

He was her master, and for the first of many times to come, she was helpless to do anything but watch as he used her to kill those she had been born to protect.

In an instant, Shiro was back in the present, uncomfortably aware of his grip on the bond, so like Zarkon’s ten thousand years ago. He released it at once and Black—aching, drowning, split between past and present—floundered.

Something impacted them, drawing a roar of pain from the Black Lion, throwing Shiro against his flight harness. He cursed, panic clawing at his throat, but when he reached for the controls to take them out of here, he was looking out again through Zarkon’s eyes as worlds burned.

“Shiro!”

Icy blue light washed through the cockpit, jumping and jittering in a way that made Shiro sick to his stomach. He groaned, squeezing his eyes shut, as Pidge fired off question after question, Nyma and Akira answering in short, tense bursts. Then Hunk and Shay were there, and Shiro’s world contracted in pain and guilt. It had been less than a week since Shay had lost her grandmother. Her parents were still healing, her home still recovering from the shock. She shouldn’t have to be here. Shiro shouldn’t need her to come to his rescue.

He was aware, distantly, that the others were calling his name, but he couldn’t find his voice to respond. Black had gone quiet around him, withdrawing into herself, and he could sense her only as a faint, trembling presence that shied away from his reach.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, unsure if he was actually making sound, or if he was only mouthing the words. With Zarkon so near, the pressure in the air kept climbing, holding him on the cusp of unconsciousness. He held on, though, straining to reach Black. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to make this right. He didn’t want to hurt her, but his team needed him. They needed to fight.

It wasn’t his fault—Black pressed that knowledge into him, not through words but through raw intent, and Shiro clung to it. It wasn’t his fault, but she _couldn’t_. Couldn’t do this—couldn’t fight—with Zarkon so close and clawing at the bond. She had cut him off, but he remembered the paladin bond well enough to try to force his way back in--he had proven that much in the skies over Earth--and the memory of what he’d done, what _she’d_ done at his command, was too much.

She begged Shiro not to make her fight him.

And Shiro yielded. He couldn’t— _wouldn’t—_ force Black to fight for him the way Zarkon had. Even if he hadn’t felt like he might pass out at any instant, he refused to let himself follow in Zarkon’s footsteps. He sensed that Zarkon, too, had begun with the best of intentions. That his greatest failing was refusing to listen to others, the Black Lion most of all.

He couldn’t see how helping his team, protecting the delegates on the planet below, stopping Zarkon—he couldn’t see how any of that was wrong, but the force of Black’s resistance took him by surprise. She didn’t want to fight, so he wouldn’t fight. Because when it came right down to it, he trusted her judgment more than he trusted his own. (A shameful thing for the black paladin to admit, but he’d played the part of a monster for too long in the Arena not to know that he sometimes pushed too far in the name of survival.)

Zarkon’s presence quieted for a moment, slow satisfaction spreading through it. It brushed up against Shiro’s mind like a frigid current in the sea, making him shiver, and he forced himself to open his eyes and face the false Black Lion across the battlefield.

Green, Yellow, and Blue were still hounding her, but they seemed not to have made a dent in her armor. The voices on the comms were jumbled to Shiro’s ears, but they sounded tense, and Shiro didn’t think it was entirely on his behalf.

A sudden salvo of lasers lit up the sky, stinging Shiro’s eyes. He winced, turning away from the light, and Black reached out. The Guard was there, along with the castle-ship and Kolivan’s forces—an entire army opening fire on Zarkon’s lion in tandem. Shiro’s heart swelled, and for a moment he let himself hope. Even a lion couldn’t stand up to that much raw damage coming at it. Not for long.

Clearly, Zarkon realized this, for he turned and rocketed away from the battle, moving faster than the others could react. Ryner called out for the others to stop firing, already giving chase in Green.

But the false Lion was faster, opening a wormhole that crackled with red lightning. Zarkon plunged in, and the last thing Shiro felt before he disappeared was a quiet, smug satisfaction.

* * *

Akira’s heart was in his throat as he set down at the edge of the Black Lion’s hangar. It was crowded in here already with four lions, and Akira was honestly surprised he didn’t clip the wall as he came in. The Black Lion had been unresponsive for most of the battle, Takashi silent on the comms except for shallow, pained breathing. The Blue and Yellow Lions had towed Black back to the castle, Green following behind, her paladins alert for signs of a second wave.

Akira had left Layeni to organize Guard patrols to protect the delegates as Coran sent them on their way. He himself couldn’t focus on anything except getting to the Black Lion and finding out what had happened to his brother.

He was out of his fighter and across the hangar before any of the lions had settled in, and he pounded on Black’s snout. “Takashi?” he called “Takashi, are you okay? Let me in!”

There was no answer, and Akira backed up, scanning for any signs that Black might be stirring. She gave none; even her eyes had gone dark, and her mouth was still sealed shut. Growling, Akira backed up, then gave a running leap at the side of the lion’s face, scrambling up to the hatch on the top of her head. As an emergency hatch, it ran on a separate power system, and Black must have still been conscious on some level to recognize Akira, for the hatch slid aside at his touch, letting him into the darkened cockpit below.

The lion sat on an angle, and Akira’s feet slid out from under him as he hit the floor of the cockpit. He smacked his chin on the floor as he fell, grunted, then clawed his way upward toward the pilot’s seat.

Takashi sat slumped at the controls, but he stirred as Akira grasped his wrist.

“Takashi.”

Takashi screwed his eyes shut, his breath hitching, but he turned his hand over to grip Akira’s wrist. “’kira?”

“You know it.” Akira gave a faltering smile, his heart beating erratically in his chest. “How are you feeling?”

Rather than answer, Takashi shifted, trying to sit upright as though he recognized he was on an angle but thought it was his own posture. He struggled against his harness for a moment before Akira quieted him. “I’m… I’m fine,” he said. He opened his eyes, glancing around the cockpit, then up at the open hatch as the others’ voices echoed in. Someone thumped against the side of Black’s head, boots scrabbling against the smooth metal. “Did I crash?”

“No. The others pulled you back to the castle. You and Black were unresponsive there for a while. You had me worried.”

Takashi found Akira’s eyes, his gaze finally focusing. He breathed in, seeming to come back to himself, and unfastened his harness. “It was Zarkon,” he said, his voice only a little shaky. “He was trying to get into my head. Or Black’s, maybe. It—wasn’t pleasant.”

“I can imagine.” Akira glanced over his shoulder as Pidge dropped through the hatch, followed closely by Nyma. “But he’s gone now, and Coran’s coordinating with the Guard to get people off-planet and back to their home systems before Zarkon decides to try again. Don’t worry—it’s all under control. You can take a minute to breathe.”

Takashi gave him a wry smile, but after adjusting his position in the seat, he glanced behind him at Pidge and Nyma. Hunk, Shay, and Ryner joined them a moment later, and Takashi offered them all a smile.

“Good work back there,” he said. “Sorry for worrying you all.”

Pidge summoned their bayard, grappling to the front of the cockpit and smacking Takashi’s arm. “Don’t apologize,” they said. “We all know Zarkon’s a bastard. How’s Black doing?”

For a moment, Akira thought Takashi was going to persist in his apology, but then he sighed and reached out for Black’s controls. He seemed unsure of himself, though he covered well, and Akira wondered what exactly had happened during the battle. Black had been flying erratically from the start, but they’d kept it together well enough—until suddenly they shut down all together. Had that been Zarkon’s doing?

Takashi closed his eyes, and the rest of the team held their breath as the cockpit descended into silence. A few heartbeats passed. Akira shifted, wedging his foot into a space underneath Takashi’s chair for better balance. Hunk and Nyma exchanged frantic whispers at the back of the cockpit.

Then the Black Lion shifted, the lights in the cockpit flickering back on. Pidge flailed as the floor tilted back to level and the console Pidge had been balancing on suddenly became a much more precarious perch. Akira caught them before they fell and squeezed Takashi’s shoulder.

“Everything good, then?”

“Yeah.” Takashi sounded uncertain, but he forced a smile. “Give us both some time to recover from the shock and we’ll be good as new.”

“We’ll have to figure out how Zarkon did whatever it is he did,” Pidge mused. “Give you and Black some extra shielding, maybe. Don’t want to give him a foothold if we can help it, right?”

Takashi was silent for a moment, then nodded. “Right.” He didn’t meet Pidge’s eyes.

Akira frowned, wondering how quickly he could bustle the other paladins out of the cockpit without arousing suspicion. Clearly there was something more going on here, but Akira knew his brother well enough to know he wouldn’t talk about it with an audience.

One of the displays flickered, a comms screen popping up to announce an incoming call.

“Keith,” Takashi breathed, reaching out at once to accept the transmission. A video feed winked on, showing Keith, Lance, and Thace huddled together in an unfamiliar, dimly-lit room.

“Shiro,” Keith said, breathless. “What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“Back on the castle-ship,” Takashi said. “Zarkon crashed the party here at the summit with a lion like the one we fought back on Earth. We managed to chase him off, for now.”

Lance breathed a curse, his hand coming down on Keith’s shoulder. Keith glanced up at him, brow furrowed. “Everyone okay?” Lance asked.

“We’re fine.”

Keith looked about as convinced by that as Akira, which was to say not very. “ _Vrekt_. I’m sorry, Shiro. We should’ve been there.”

“Don’t worry about it, Keith, for real,” Hunk said. “We handled it. Everything okay with you guys? I tried calling you last night, but it didn’t go through.”

Keith’s ears lay back, and he ducked his head, glancing to Lance. Akira had almost managed to relax, but his hackles went up again at that look—guilty, embarrassed. He half expected Keith to bolt from the room.

Lance pursed his lips. “Sorry about that, Hunk. We finally made contact with the rebellion here and it… It could have gone more smoothly.”

“We spent last night in a holding cell,” Thace said flatly, “as the rebels debated whether or not they could trust us.”

Lance held up his hands, laughing nervously, as the paladins in Black’s cockpit all began talking at once. “We’re cool! I mean, obviously. We’re not dead.”

But clearly there was more to it than that. Keith still wasn’t looking at the screen, and he seemed exhausted, his shoulders slumped and his fingers massaging his forehead. Akira wondered how much Layeni would hate him if he jumped back in his fighter and took a sabbatical to the Galra homeworld.

“You’re okay, then?” Takashi asked, suspicion in his voice to match Akira’s. Which was especially ironic considering how hard he was trying to mask his own shakiness.

“I’m fine,” Keith said. “Red was freaking out pretty bad when she got the call—I mean, _Zarkon_. Don’t blame her.” He shrugged. “I just needed to make sure you were okay. We can come back if you need us.”

Takashi shook his head. “Stay there for now. Hopefully we don’t have a repeat of today, but even if we do, what you’re doing is important.”

“You got it, Shiro,” Lance said, squeezing Keith’s shoulder. “So, Hunk, what were you calling about?”

Hunk stiffened, going suddenly red, and Akira smiled into his hand as Hunk fumbled for words, Shay patting his arm. “Oh! Uh—right—um. Well, I guess now’s as good a time as any to say it, right? I mean, we’re all so busy, who knows when we’ll get a chance to talk again, right?”

Pidge elbowed him in the side, their lips twitching. “Just say it, Hunk. You know you want to.”

Hunk squeezed his eyes shut and forced the words out in a rush. “Shay and I kinda got engaged? Sort of? Wait, rewind. Did I ever tell you about Unity?”

On the screen, Lance and Keith both blinked, slow to process the breathless jumble of syllables. A moment later, Lance figured it out, and his face lit up. “Oh my god, _what?_ Hunk!” he shrieked, locking his arms around Keith’s neck and shaking him. “That’s amazing! I’m so happy for you guys! Wait— _fuck,_  I can’t hug you through the comms! Keith, get your keys! We’re taking a road trip to the castle!”

“I—what?” Keith grabbed onto Lance’s arms, trying to steady himself. He seemed dazed, and Akira couldn’t help but laugh. “Keys…?”

Hunk flailed his hands, tripping over his words as he rushed to assure Lance that he didn’t need to come back right away, that it wasn’t that big a deal. Lance shouted over him, demanding more details, and Takashi quickly vacated his seat, gesturing Hunk forward.

Akira’s grin faded as Takashi slipped out the back of the cockpit, pinching the bridge of his nose. With a glance around to make sure no one else had noticed, Akira followed, catching Takashi at the foot of the ramp.

“Hey,” Akira called. “Everything okay?”

“Headache.” The response seemed almost automatic, and Takashi cringed as soon as it was out, his steps slowing. He turned, smiling as Akira put a hand on his arm. “I just need to rest. Today was a lot, and I don’t want to ruin the mood in there.”

Akira frowned. “Okay… You sure you’re all right, though? Not every day you tangle with a ten thousand year old dictator with psychic tendencies.”

Takashi cracked a smile at that. “No, it’s definitely not. But I’m fine. Zarkon didn’t get a chance to do anything. I’m tired, and I do have a headache, but I'm... I  _will_ be fine.”

There was something Takashi wasn’t saying, but he was fragile in a way Akira had become too familiar with over the last months, and he knew pushing now would do no good. So when Takashi pulled away, Akira let him go, concern tugging at his chest.

Tomorrow, he promised himself. He’d check in with Takashi tomorrow.


	23. The Heart and the Tower

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... The summit ended with a bang as Zarkon attacked, nearly taking Shiro and Black out of commission. Black's panic reached all the way to Red and to Keith, who got caught up in her memories of her imprisonment and a conversation between Zarkon and Lealle. Meanwhile Team Hogwarts found a tower Allura believed would lead them to Oriande, but something went strange when Val stepped through, and she landed back on Roya Vosar, alone. No one on the castle has been able to reach them since. And since Rax showed up in the cell, Sam and Rolo know their time is running short. The druids mean to make robeasts of them--which means they can't play it safe any longer.

“Hello?” Edi’s voice echoed back to her, smaller and more frightened than she’d meant it to be. She sucked in a breath to steady herself and tried again. “Allura? Is anyone there?”

There was no answer, of course, just as there had been no answer any of the other times she’d called. She didn’t know where she was, if she was anywhere at all. The last thing she remembered was stepping through the glowing tower—the gateway to Oriande—and into… well, _nothing._

It was very white here. Overpoweringly white. The sky (if that’s what it was) didn’t glow, exactly, but it still stung her eyes, and the lack of shadows made her queasy. She thought there was a floor, if only because she was able to stand and walk and her shoes made small, clipped noises when she walked, but she tried her best not to look down. Looking down, it seemed she wasn’t standing on anything at all, and she worried she might start falling and never stop.

She was alone—completely alone. There was nowhere for anyone to hide here, anyway, even if she did sometimes feel like she was being watched. There was never anyone there when she turned, though, just more white.

“Hello!” she called again. “Allura! Val! Matt! Anyone?” Her voice faltered, and she pulled her hands in close to her chest, glancing around. “I’m scared,” she whispered. She wasn’t sure who she was talking to, but saying the words out loud made her feel a little better, and she started walking again. Maybe it didn’t make a difference. It wasn’t like there was anywhere to go here. But at least if she was moving she wouldn’t feel so much like she wanted to just curl up in a ball on the ground and cry.

“Is this Oriande?” she asked her echo, turning a slow circle as she walked. “It doesn’t look like an ancient Altean temple to me.”

The echo sounded for a moment like Maka when he imitated her, and she put her hands on her hips, lifting her chin and talking back to the sky like it really was Maka.

“Well, it’s not like _you_ know where we are any better than I do,” she said. “At least I’m trying to figure something out.”

She could see his sullen little pout, the way he’d cross his arms and huff and tell her she wasn’t doing a very good job figuring things out, now was she?

And he was right—or, well, _she_ was right. She _wasn’t_ doing a very good job. Wandering around, shouting at the sky, calling for people who weren’t there in the first place? No. She was better than that.

She sat down, crossing her legs, and tried to think this through. She’d felt sick when Allura first activated the gate, but none of the others seemed to be affected. Was it because her magic wasn’t as strong? Because she was Galra? Or maybe it had something to do with them being paladins. They had to deal with weirder things than a glowing tower all the time. Maybe they’d gotten used to magicky things like that.

That still didn’t explain where she was now _._ Or, more importantly, how to get _out_. It didn’t matter if she was stuck between Roya Vosar and Oriande, or if Oriande didn’t exist anymore so there’d been nowhere for the gate to take her, or if she was inside the tower itself. (Well… it _did_ matter, because if Oriande didn’t exist anymore, she didn’t know who else might be able to find her and pull her out.)

But it _didn’t_ matter. What mattered was whether she was stuck here forever, or if there was a way for her to go back. And if the others were stuck, too.

Unfortunately, she didn’t see anything around that looked like a way out. She didn’t see anything that looked like _anything_. No doors, no portals, no shimmers in the air that stood out from the rest of the white. The only thing she could think to do was to keep wandering and hope that turned up something sooner or later.

As she rose, the fur along the back of her neck stood on end, unease creeping down her spine. She’d felt this before: a pressure on the back of her head like something was watching her from behind. She froze, ears swiveling toward the presence, but she didn’t hear anything. Not footsteps, not breathing, not even the dampening of sound she sometimes noticed when Maka was doing his best to sneak up on her.

She turned, heart pounding, but there was still nothing there.

“Allura?” she whispered, feeling all at once too small for this space. “Allura, I’m scared. Where are you?”

She blinked furiously, trying to get rid of her tears, then turned her back on the nothing that was watching her and strode away into the void.

* * *

“I do not understand you.”

Sam was already halfway out of himself when Rax spoke, and the sound jolted him back into the physical world. The guards had just come for Rolo, and Sam was supposed to meet him in the lab. Today was the day they pressed their luck, and Sam was already sick with worry and second thoughts. A conversation with Rax was honestly the last thing he needed.

But Rax initiating a conversation was so rare, and he still seemed so lost after a week in the cell, that Sam couldn’t make himself ignore him.

He cracked an eye, looking to where Rax sat, huddled in his usual corner, his fingers digging into his arms as he hugged himself.

“What was that?” Sam asked.

Rax curled in on himself. “I said I do not understand you. You speak of Rolo as though you care for him, and you make a good show of fretting when they come for him—and yet as soon as he is gone, you sleep. I cannot decide if the worry is a lie or if you are able to rest in spite of it, and either way I do not understand.”

 _Oh, Rax,_ Sam thought. _There are a great many things you don’t understand, and I hope you never have to learn about them._ “The worry is genuine,” he said, straightening his back and turning toward Rax. He prayed Rolo would wait for him to begin their plan. “But fighting the guards when they come for us accomplishes nothing, and wearing myself out with worry while he’s gone doesn’t help, either. It’s when Rolo gets back that he’s going to need me. If I sleep now, maybe I can stay awake to watch over him when he gets back, in case it’s one of the bad days.”

Rax showed no reaction to the implication that the experiments sometimes inflicted physical harm. Sam supposed he’d seen the state Sam himself was in when Rax first arrived, and perhaps he’d noticed Rolo’s healing wrist—though perhaps not. The druids had fixed it sometime while Sam was drifting, for no reason Sam could see. What did it matter to the Empire whether a couple of test subjects came through their experiments in one piece?

Frowning, Rax leaned back against the wall. “And what if he does not return?”

Sam’s heart clenched at the thought, and he strained toward the lab instinctively, nearly pulling right out of his body. “I can’t very well stop that from happening as long as I’m in here, can I?” His tone was clipped, and he regretted it at once. Rax didn’t deserve to bear the brunt of Sam’s impatience, and snapping at him wouldn’t do Rolo any good.

The way Rax flinched in response to Sam’s words only made Sam feel worse, and he scooted across the cell, breathing out a sigh.

“I don’t like to think about that possibility,” Sam admitted, softening his tone. He didn’t reach out for Rax yet, but sat nearby, staring at the opposite wall. “I know it might happen, of course. I’ve watched enough prisoners disappear in my time to know nothing is ever certain. But if I let myself think about it, it’s going to consume me. Better to expect him to return. If I’m ever wrong, it might destroy me—but at least it won’t destroy me before then.”

Rax bent forward, resting his forehead on his knees, and let out a low, mournful hum. “My sister is much the same as you. I know not how to expect good things,” he whispered. “I suppose I have been disappointed too many times to trust to hope.”

“I’m sorry, Rax. You deserved better than that.”

He shook his head, the motion sharp and faltering, and his arms tightened around his legs. “I am afraid.”

Sam’s heart gave a pang of sympathy. “Of what?”

“That— _vex._ ” His voice broke, and his arms reached up to cover his head. Alarmed, Sam closed the distance between them, resting a cautious hand on Rax’s arm.

“Breathe,” Sam whispered.

Rax did so, tremulous though that breath was. He breathed again, the mournful hum coming and going as his breathing faltered and evened out in an endless cycle.

“I think my grandmother is dead,” Rax whispered. “Perhaps my parents as well. Perhaps everyone who tried to shelter me.”

Sam twisted, pulling Rax into an embrace before he had time to wonder whether Rax wanted it. The boy remained stiff, his body quivering with tension, but he didn’t pull away, and so Sam held on, rubbing his back as questions poured through his mind. Rax hadn’t spoken of his capture—where he’d been, how it had happened. Sam had hoped anyone with him might have escaped, as Nyma and Beezer had escaped when Rolo was captured, but he’d known that they might just have been sent elsewhere, as Matt and Shiro had been. But this--

“I’m sorry, Rax,” Sam whispered. “I’m sorry. I know how much it hurts not to know what happened to your family, but--” He bit down on a curse. “Don’t give up hope, son. Don’t ever give up hope. They can take everything else away from you, but don’t let them have that.”

“I cannot.” Rax turned his head into Sam’s shoulder, his voice shaking now. “It was always Shay who guarded our hope. I could never hold it for myself.”

“Then let me guard your hope now.” Sam pulled him closer, shushing him as his ragged breathing broke apart into sobs. “Can you try to trust me that much, Rax? Can you trust me when I say there’s still hope?”

Rax didn’t answer, but he leaned further into Sam, visibly struggling to hold himself together. Sam rubbed his back, humming a lullaby he’d sung to his kids not so very long ago, until Rax’s breathing evened out. He must have been exhausted—dragged out of the cell nearly every day this week, waking frequently in the night. He probably thought he’d hidden his nightmares from the other two, but Sam and Rolo were both light sleepers after six months at this lab. They hadn’t talked about it, but they knew Rax wasn’t doing well.

So Sam let him sleep, boneless against Sam’s side. They propped each other up well enough; Sam’s body ought to hold the position without him in it.

“Don’t give up, Rax,” Sam whispered, pulling out of himself. He lingered in the cell for a moment, watching Rax sleep. “We’re going to try to get you home. Soon, I hope.”

He didn’t want to go, but he was all too aware that Rolo was waiting for him. So, giving Rax one last lingering look, he turned and willed himself toward the lab.

* * *

Twenty minutes outside the 301, Keith started to regret not having Lance along. Lance had offered to come, of course, but Keith assured him it wouldn’t take long, and anyway it was for the best if Lance and Thace kept working on solidifying the treaty with the rebels.

It would be for the best if Keith kept working at that, too, but he doubted he’d have been much help even if he’d been able to tamp down on the restless energy pulling him out to the wastes. The leader, Mirek, might have accepted them as allies, but that didn’t mean everyone was okay with it—Arel least of all. He’d accused them of conspiring with the Empire when they called Shiro, and he probably thought Keith leaving now was just as suspicious, but if Keith had stayed, especially in this state, they’d probably have ended up in a fist fight, and that wouldn’t help anyone.

Besides, Red needed him.

The flight out to Red’s hiding spot was long and lonely, and Keith couldn’t stop wondering what he was going to find. He’d had to take a small shuttle they’d stolen and stripped down to bare bones. All he really needed was an engine and a closed cockpit, as there wasn’t much of an atmosphere on the homeworld. That meant no comms, no navigation, and a faulty temperature regulator. Keith strained to remember landmarks he’d noted several months ago, the silence and the frigid cold sapping his concentration. Only Red’s presence ahead kept him going, pulling him to her by instinct when his memory failed him.

He’d left the 301 in the morning, and the day was half gone by the time he found Red, still nestled in the cave they’d found for her—a cave that now showed signs of several small cave-ins, with chunks of stone littering the ground and gouges in the walls. Red lay curled up in the center of the room, her particle barrier glowing a warning.

Keith stopped his shuttle at the mouth of the cave, sealed his helmet, and climbed out. If the cold inside his shuttle had been distracting, out here it was bordering on painful, even with his suit’s environmental controls. He didn’t have a fully space-worthy set of armor here, except his paladin armor, which he’d left with Red. Anything well-made enough to protect him in the wastes would have drawn too much attention.

“Red?” Keith jogged across the cave, as much to generate heat as to get to Red. He slowed as he approached her, lifting a hand to rest against her shield. “It’s me,” he said. “Let me in.”

She flinched, rumbling in a way that set Keith’s teeth rattling, and the particle barrier remained stubbornly in place. Keith’s heart sank. She’d been tending this way for some time now—quiet, withdrawn, jumping at shadows—but it had gotten worse after Shiro’s emergency call. Keith was pretty sure the strange visions that had overtaken him in the rebel base had come from Red. Flashbacks, or as close as an atemporal psychic robot could come to flashbacks.

Keith forced the tension out of his shoulders and leaned his helmet against the barrier. “I’m sorry, Red,” he whispered. “I—I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but I know you’re hurting. You’ve _been_ hurting. I should have come out here a long time ago.” He lifted his gaze, taking in her posture. There was no word for it other than defensive, and it sent an ache through him. “I’m here now, though. I want to help.”

She gave no immediate response, but after a moment of silence she finally dropped her shield, then picked herself up as Keith approached, lowering her head and extending her ramp to let him into her cockpit.

Once he was inside, the ache amplified a hundredfold. Keith stumbled, the breath rushing out of his lungs like he’d just been punched. Had Red really been hurting like this all along? It coursed through him, a throbbing pain that drove all other thoughts from his head. It wasn’t a physical pain, though he thought that might have been more bearable.

Instead, it felt like the day Haggar had taken Shiro, when Keith and Matt’s agony and despair had fueled each other, mutating into a living thing that threatened to consume them both.

Somehow, Keith made it to his chair, and he collapsed into it. Red tried to pull away, gathering up the shreds of her pain as though to hide them from Keith, but he grabbed the controls, grounding himself in the bond.

“Don’t,” he whispered. “It’s okay. I can take this.”

She hesitated, neither withdrawing further nor loosening her hold on the pain she’d already gathered close to herself. She radiated shame and sorrow, and Keith floundered.

“Red, I—What is this about? I don’t understand. Is this about Zarkon attacking the others?”

She didn’t answer him with words, but the amorphous thoughts she pressed into his mind told him that no, it wasn’t about that, though Black’s panic had triggered this particular downward spiral. The real problem ran much deeper than that.

Keith closed his eyes, thinking of the nightmares that had filtered through to him in the city. “Is it about Keturah?”

A flash of shock, of pain, and Red let out a rumble. It almost could have been called a purr, but it was sharper, more insistent. Keith could taste her distress in the air around him. He leaned into the bond, offering what comfort he could, though he was fumbling through a dark room. He knew very little about Keturah, and though he’d caught glimpses of her fate, enough to know that she’d survived the battle during which she and Red had been captured, he had no clue what had happened to her after that.

He suspected Red blamed herself for it, whatever it was.

“How can I help?” Keith asked, because he found himself at a loss. He stumbled over comforting Matt and Lance and Shiro, never mind Red. He couldn’t exactly give her a hug, and he had no clue what else might help.

Slowly, Red’s presence unfurled, a current in the air reaching for his chest. It felt like an invitation, tentative though it was, like Red was offering to show him the way. The fact that she didn’t simply do whatever she had in mind spoke to her shaken state—she’d never been the type to ask his permission before she did something. It was moot anyway, since she knew his mind, and she didn’t have the patience to go through the motions.

She was asking now, though, and Keith seized hold off her offer at once. He would have done anything for her in that moment.

He sensed her gratitude, her uncertainty—and then nothing as everything fell away.

* * *

There had been a time, when Matt was eight or nine, that he’d been obsessed with volcanoes. He’d watched every video and played every game he could get his hands on. He’d built an unnecessarily elaborate model volcano for a school project. He told everyone that he wanted to be a volcanologist when he grew up.

Even if his volcano phase hadn’t run its course within a year or so, Matt was pretty sure getting stranded in a lava field would have exhausted his enthusiasm after the first couple of hours.

He wasn’t sure how long it had been at this point. Five hours? Six? Time was fluid here. _Everything_ was fluid here. He kept seeing phantoms in the lava, in the darkness between flows, and in the steam billowing in on the wind. At once point Keith had been here—actually physically been here, though he barely seemed aware of himself, much less of his surroundings.

He’d vanished almost as soon as he appeared, and Matt was left wondering whether that had been just another trick on Oriande’s part. (Though… _was_ it Oriande? Something strange had happened when Matt charged into the tower, and he hadn’t decided yet whether it was his own fault, or if the people who built the tower had decided to fuck with him.)

Whatever the case, here he was. Standing on a lava field beneath a sea of stars, the sun on the horizon apparently stuck halfway through setting. He suspected there was water in the direction of the fog, but he couldn’t get more than a few feet in without his vision deteriorating to the point that he started to get uncomfortable. He thought it might have been the fact that this place was utterly silent, aside from Matt’s own footsteps and breathing, together with the fact that despite the literal lava flowing all around, he didn’t feel hot.

He didn’t feel much of anything, which meant his sight was the only thing keeping him grounded. He supposed it made sense. He still couldn’t sleep without something there to remind him he was real, be it the ambient light and white noise of the castle or Shiro there to latch onto when he started to forget where he was. He’d learned that the hard way on Quom, the first time he woke up alone in their hut in the middle of the night and thought for a long while he was back in a coffin on a dead world.

Matt shivered, tearing his eyes off the mist. No thanks. He’d take his chances with the lava.

It had been another few hours since Keith had put in his appearance, and Matt was seriously beginning to doubt anything had happened at all. He was just wandering at this point, occasionally calling for Allura, Val, and Edi on the off-chance they’d wound up here, too. He figured either there was a secret door somewhere or he wasn't actually alone, and he didn't know what he would do if he couldn't find either.

Suddenly the world around him flickered. One second he was walking along a ridge of black stone left over from a lava flow that had long since cooled. The next he was standing on top of a fresh flow, red light shining through the blackened crust. The lava gave slightly beneath his weight like walking across a bog, except it was flames licking at his boots rather than water. Matt cursed as he stumbled back, seeking more solid ground.

It was really a good thing the lava here couldn’t _actually_ burn him.

He wasn’t sure what it was that alerted him. A change in the silence, maybe. A sound too soft for him to consciously register. But even as he scrambled up a rocky slope, the back of his neck crawled, and he looked up to find the Red Lion towering over him.

He froze, wondering whether this was another illusion. Hell, he was starting to think the tower was one big maze of hallucinations.

Except he could feel Red. She was here—her presence jumbled up and aching, but closer than Matt had felt it in months. He hadn’t sensed her at all most of that time. He didn’t know how it was possible for her to be here now, unless…

_The Heart._

Shiro had mentioned it first—a sea of stars where he and Allura and Black had sheltered while Haggar controlled their bodies. Or… well, the true Heart was deeper, not so much a metaphysical space as a perfect union between paladin and Lion. But mostly it was that starscape on the astral plane. Allura knew more about it than Shiro, but Matt hadn’t seen any reason to go poking at those wounds just to sate his curiosity. Pidge had mentioned something similar happening on Olkarion, except for them it had been a forest like Vivasi itself. Fligg had mentioned it too, as part of Val’s training. Apparently the blue paladins had also visited the Heart, though Matt hadn’t heard what it looked like for them.

He supposed, Red being who she was, he should have expected her Heart to be as close to a sea of fire as the natural world could produce.

Huffing, Matt grabbed onto a knob at the top of this slope and hauled himself up, a slow smile growing on his face. “Please don’t tell me this was all your doing, Red. I have things I need to—Keith.”

Keith turned, blinking. “Matt?” His brow furrowed, and he looked back to Red. “Hang on, what’s happening? Where are we?”

“The Heart, I think.” Matt dusted his hands off and came forward, resting a hand on Keith’s shoulder. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. Not so sure about Red.”

“Huh.” Matt considered Red, who seemed to be doing her best to pretend she didn’t notice them. “So… Were you actually here a little bit ago, or did I imagine that?”

Keith gave a start, his ears laying flat for a moment before he cracked a smile. “To be honest, I kinda thought _I’d_ imagined it. I was caught in Red’s memories or something. I think. It was kind of a mess.”

“Sounds like it. Did something happen?”

“I guess Zarkon came to attack the summit. Everyone’s fine,” Keith added as Matt tensed. “They drove him off. It just freaked everyone out, Red included.”

_**Bad memories.** _

Matt looked up at Red, concerns bubbling up at the strain in her words. She seemed to be trying to say as little as possible—and yet she’d brought them both here, or let them be brought, or however this all worked. Matt was pretty sure they wouldn’t be here, in this space, with Red, if she didn’t want them to be.

“Memories?” he asked, inching forward. “You mean memories of Zarkon?”

Red rumbled an affirmative.

Keith lifted a hand, and Red lowered her head until she was on a level where he could touch her chin. “And Keturah.”

Matt felt suddenly cold, despite the lava all around. “Keturah?”

“She didn’t die right away like everyone thought,” Keith said, staring up at Red. Matt could feel him searching the bond, silently asking Red if it was okay to talk about this. “I think they tortured her before they killed her. Red could still sense her through the bond.”

“Fuck,” Matt muttered.

Red shifted, the bond shivering in a way that made Matt’s vision feel funny. _**It was a long time ago. You can’t fix it now.** _

“Yeah, but--” Keith huffed as Red cut him off with a rumble.

 _**I can’t—I don’t want to talk about her. Please--** _ Red went on, but it didn’t come to Matt as words after that. It was images—images of Keturah, of darkness, and then, more vividly of Matt and Keith. The pain underlying it all was too sharp, and Matt wrapped his arms around his chest to try to hold it in. _**Don’t ask me to remember.** _

“We won’t,” Matt said, glancing to Keith, who nodded emphatically. “But if you’re hurting, we want to help. Isn’t there anything we can do?”

 _**You’re here,** _ Red said. After a moment, she relaxed, her presence reaching out to encompass both Matt and Keith. _**I just needed to know you were both safe and not…** _

She trailed off again, but Matt didn’t need to hear her say the words. “We’re here,” he said, pressing his hand to her snout, over Keith’s. “We’re here, and we’re not going anywhere.”

* * *

Karen had trouble sleeping that night. The battle itself would have been bad enough, even with her down on the ground, sheltering inside where she saw nothing of the fighting but had to deal with panicky diplomats for over an hour.

Then had come the fallout—some delegations rushing to pledge their support to the treaty where before they had been on the fence, others suddenly having second thoughts. Only one had actually withdrawn support, but too many of the neutral parties had shut down, pasting on thin smiles and refusing to speak as they hastened on their way. They were going to need to reassure these people in the near future. The threat of the Galra Empire was bad enough, but having Zarkon show up personally to disrupt the summit?

At least the paladins had driven him off, and having the six of them come to reassure everyone of their safety had helped, though not perhaps as much as it would have if Shiro hadn’t looked two steps away from collapse. The fact that he’d disappeared soon after addressing the delegates and hadn’t showed up once to see anyone off had Karen worried. She and Akira had already discussed what to do in the morning if Shiro wasn’t back to full strength--Karen thought a little bit of mothering was in order, but Akira had only laughed at her suggestion that she force him to take a day off from his duties to catch up on sleep. When she pressed Akira for his proposal, however, he only grinned and said he'd heard the pool was lovely this time of year.

(As she considered that, Karen decided that perhaps this was an issue better left between brothers, after all.)

Getting everyone out of the castle-ship was faster than bringing them all in, if only because everyone was eager to get away from Eltava, but it still took hours. Karen and Akira coordinated in the hangars while Coran manned the wormhole generator. Eventually, though, Layeni and Kolivan took over, freeing up Karen and Akira to go find food and rest.

Except Karen couldn’t sleep. She kept trying to gauge just how much of a disaster the attack had been—or if it actually balanced out in their favor. She knew there was no point trying to predict anything yet; she would just have to wait and see how it fell out.

That didn’t stop her mind from spinning circles, the same way it did in the middle of a big trial when she was trying to read the room. So here she was, wandering a castle that was silent for the first time in a week. Her body craved sleep, but her mind kept coming back to a single problem.

The door to Keena’s room was open when Karen got there, cheery light spilling out into the dark corridor. The sight actually made Karen stop in her tracks. She’d been chasing Keena down for the last two days, trying to corner her so she could find out what she was up to, but Keena kept slipping away. Finding her now, without even really trying, felt surreal.

Well, she wasn’t going to let the strangeness of the situation get in her way. Frowning, she stalked forward, trying to gather her thoughts as she went. Should she start out with a gentle prod, try to play up their awkward friendship to get Keena to talk to her? Or would that just give Keena a chance to wriggle out of this? Maybe Karen should hit hard and fast, try to catch her off guard.

She still hadn’t decided her approach when she reached the door and found Keena sitting within, hunched over a keyboard and typing furiously.

Karen knocked on the wall, and Keena jumped, spinning toward her. Her hand dropped to her waist, where she wore her knife, but she relaxed as soon as she saw Karen standing there, a smile breaking across her weary face.

“Karen, hey! Why aren’t you sleeping?”

Karen fought down a surge of irritation and forced a smile. “Still too wound up after the battle, I guess.” She paused, then plowed ahead. “Sorry I’ve been so busy this week. I’m a terrible host.”

Keena waved her hand. “Don’t worry about it! I kept myself busy.”

“Yeah… I thought I saw you down at the summit a couple of times. Kolivan change his mind about giving you clearance or something?”

It felt like walking a tightrope, trying not to stray too far into overt accusations without softening her questions. Karen didn’t exactly have a lot of experience with that, and she didn’t trust Keena’s lack of reaction to mean she actually hadn’t noticed Karen’s suspicions, but she didn’t clam up.

Leaning back in her chair until her back popped, Keena flashed a smile. “Uh… no, actually.” She held up her hands, smiling guiltily. “I know, I know, I wasn’t supposed to be there. I thought I was being sneakier than that—figured if no one knew about it, no one but me could get in trouble for it.”

That… wasn’t exactly the answer Karen had been expecting. She came forward, sitting in the room’s second chair, a recliner. Keena had taken one of the nicer rooms—not the suites set aside for visiting dignitaries, but a room with an attached office and sitting area. Aside from the desk where Keena sat and Karen’s chair, there was a loveseat and a small table, Karen supposed for entertaining guests.

“Okay,” Karen said slowly. “But why were you there in the first place?”

Keena’s smile turned devious, and she turned back to the computer, typing out one final line before removing a data chip from the base of the display. “Information.” She turned, handing the chip to Karen.

Startled, Karen took it. Her face must have shown her shock, for Keena laughed, kicking her feet up on her desk.

“Don’t act so surprised, Karen. You know what I am. This is what I _do_. I talk to people. Gather information. That’s the upside of not being part of the official summit team, you know. Everyone was perfectly willing to believe I was an independent agent. Freed up their tongues a little. I passed along a little money, made a few little promises… did some other stuff you probably don’t want to know about…”

Karen arched an eyebrow, curling her fingers over the data chip. “Fair enough. What sort of information did you gather?”

“Anything. Everything.” Keena shrugged. “You can tell Shiro and Kolivan that I’ll happily help them go through that data if they want, but I tried to break it down a little—organized by delegation, listing anything and everything you might be able to use in negotiations. Ways to sweeten the pot, or to put the fire to their tails, depending on your mood.”

_And you’re just giving this to us?_

Karen felt bad for even thinking it, but she couldn’t help it. However much sense Keena’s story made on the surface, it still felt like a lie. She’d gone to an awful lot of trouble to get this information without anyone knowing about it, so to just hand it over without a protest…

Karen couldn’t help but wonder what else Keena was holding back.

But it was late, and the leaders of the Coalition would probably be grateful for this information. Karen shouldn’t burn bridges with Keena just yet.

She’d just have to keep a closer eye on her in the future.

* * *

“Okay, something weird is going on.”

Val stood atop a cliff, hands on her hips, and scowled at the land below her. She’d set out an hour ago—she _thought_ it had only been an hour—headed back toward the tower that was supposed to take her to Oriande. It had gone well at first, but as she drew closer to the tower, she lost sight of it, the canopy too thick to see anything from this angle.

But she’d pressed on. After all, she was close—close enough she figured she had to run into either the tower or the ship within a couple of minutes. Then she’d emerged from the thick underbrush to find the clearing empty. She’d climbed a tree (not easy here where the branches were few and far between) and finally reached the canopy—only to find that she’d overshot the tower by at least a mile.

Hot, tired, and confused, she’d started walking again. The navigational equipment in her armor wasn’t working, just as her comms weren’t working—probably fried by passing through the tower—but she had a decent sense of direction, and she stopped twice more to climb up and make sure she was still headed for the tower. Even when it started raining, a heavy, muggy drizzle that did nothing whatsoever to cool Val down, she kept plodding along, everything focused on the tower.

She _should_ have been there now, but instead she found herself standing on a cliff, staring down at an ocean that definitely didn’t exist in this part of Roya Vosar.

“Seriously, what the heck?” she muttered, glancing over her shoulder. It still looked like the same forest, though she supposed it was hard to tell one forest from another when you were already hopelessly lost.

It had stopped raining at some point. Or rather, it seemed to have never rained at all. The ground here was perfectly dry. So, for that matter, was Val.

The tower was still up ahead, a featureless spire glowing faintly white on a rocky islet near shore like some sort of wandering lighthouse. Seriously. Had Val hit her head when she got dumped in that river or something?

She lingered on the cliff for a few minutes, weighing her options. On the one hand, the tower was her only solid landmark on Roya Vosar, and her best chance for getting to Oriande, where she could only hope the others had ended up. On the other hand, the tower she wanted definitely hadn’t been on the seashore.

But what else was she going to do, sit here and watch the sun set?

She paced the edge of the cliff, contemplating her way down. A quick test showed that, no, her jets weren’t working. Apparently nothing in her armor was working, except maybe the temperature regulation. It should still offer some protection if she fell, but she didn’t want to trust too much in that. Better to get down safely on her own merits.

Unfortunately, there were no obvious paths, and the cliff seemed to continue in both directions far enough that it wasn’t worth searching for a gentler slope. Heart pounding, she lowered herself over the edge of the cliff, face toward the near-vertical slope, and began to climb down. (It was only thirty feet or so. As long as she didn’t immediately screw up, she’d probably be fine.)

The dirt kept trying to crumble away beneath her feet, but there were enough stone ledges to hold her weight, and enough places where the cliff face bulged out that she could rest, and she made steady progress toward the beach below. She checked her distance once, but the height only made her dizzy. The height, the crashing waves below her, and the knowledge that this world had a penchant for rearranging itself without notice. She turned her eyes back toward the cliff in front of her and focused on taking it one step at a time.

Her feet found solid ground sooner than she’d been expecting, and Val groaned into the cliff. “Fucking… Don’t do this to me, _come on._ ”

Checking her balance, Val stepped away from the cliff, turning a slow circle.

The ocean was gone. So was the forest she’d left at the top of the cliff. She stood now in a deep, narrow canyon, jagged walls rising on either side of her. A swift-moving river flowed behind her, the water level much lower than the erosion of the canyon floor indicated was common, and her mind turned immediately toward flash floods. For a moment, the sound of ocean waves echoed off the canyon walls. Then, as though realizing its mistake, it cut off. A few seconds of total silence passed before the river’s voice put in an appearance.

“Okay, cool,” Val said, blowing a few stray strands of hair out of her face. “The planet keeps changing, sound is fake, and the tower keeps moving.”

Right. The tower. Val glanced both ways, but the canyon curved away, hiding whatever might have been there. She thought she saw a faint glow reflected off the water upstream, but she couldn’t be sure.

“Nope. Not doing this.” Val craned her neck, glancing toward the top of the cliff, which looked like it belonged back in New Mexico, not way out in the middle of the forest on Roya Vosar. Was that a _cactus?_

Wrinkling her nose, Val gathered her Quintessence, focusing on the place she wanted to appear. It was easiest when she could see her destination—as simple as picturing herself standing at the location, then sending her Quintessence streaming out toward it. She lost a little Quintessence in travel, which was good for bleeding off extra from the crystals inside her, though it also severely limited her range. Fortunately, she didn’t need to go far to get a look at this canyon and figure out which way she needed to go.

This time, though, the split was instantaneous, no sense of energy disappearing into thin air.

It also wasn’t at all like anything she’d done before. Her vision fragmented, the view from the bottom of the canyon layered over with a second view, this one far overhead— _far_ overhead. She saw a world splayed out beneath her. Oceans and forest and desert and mountains.

It definitely wasn’t the Roya Vosar she’d seen from orbit.

Before she could figure out what the hell she was looking at, Val’s vision snapped back into one. Unfortunately the _one_ that remained was currently plummeting through the upper atmosphere, screaming her head off as the wind howled in her ears.

“Shit!” Val cried, flailing as she began to tumble. Flashes of green and blue, of dark and light, blurred across her vision, and she screwed her eyes shut, trying to focus on the tower. If she could just get back there, she could sit and wait for the others to come back. No more shifting landscapes, no more teleporting into the sky.

The wind cut out, replaced by birdsong, but Val was still falling, the ground below growing closer at an alarming rate.

Oh god. She was going to die. She was going to die alone in some weird pocket dimension. She wondered what had happened to the others. They’d gone through that freaky murder-gate, too. Were they already dead?

They couldn’t be. Or at least, they wouldn’t die by teleportation. That was Val’s own unique irony, however far it was from her usual power set. Maybe the others were just lost. Maybe their magic was just waiting for them to use it before it turned on them. She wished there was some way for her to warn them. Just so her death wasn’t completely pointless.

The birdsong cut out again, silence swallowing Val whole. Her stomach lurched as a gust of wind caught her, tossing her about. She tumbled, opening her eyes to a swirl of colors (close, _way_ too close) before covering her face and bracing for the end.

The world tilted, something yanking Val upward, and she broke the surface with a gasp, frigid water dripping down her face. "What the--?" Val gasped as a wave smacked her in the face, pushing her underwater again, and she thrashed, momentary panic overriding all else until she found air again and gulped in a lungful of air, her teeth already chattering as the chill of the water finally hit her.

An ocean.

She'd appeared in the middle of the freaking ocean.

" _What the hell is this place?_ " she seethed, finally orienting herself so she could tread water without plunging under with every wave. She turned a slow circle, looking for signs of a shore, and found nothing.

No. There was something visible every so often between waves. An island of some sort, lush and towering, and there atop a cliff overlooking the ocean, as though to taunt Val--there was the tower. The island seemed an impossible distance away, but hell. She'd probably end up in a desert in five minutes, so what did it really matter? Better than treading water until she passed out from exhaustion and drowned.

Gritting her teeth, Val turned and started swimming for the island.

* * *

Sam and Rolo tore through the lab, wreaking havoc wherever they passed. Sam plunged into the computer, his mind fragmenting as he went. He brushed up against files, corrupting some and outright erasing others, adding bits to system files that broke the code. He passed in an instant, and when he stepped out, error messages showed on every screen. He spared a moment to mourn the loss of the files, but they’d yielded very little useful information. The coordinates of this base. The fact that they were building a new, stronger form of robeasts, with Sam, Rolo, and Rax as their pilots. Nothing else but commentary on connections and separations and the results of a hundred scans neither Sam nor Rolo knew how to interpret.

Across the lab, Rolo solidified on the far side of the imager, shaking his head as indicator lights flashed red and the steady hum of its motor wound down. The druids, medical staff, and sentries all stiffened at the sight, and Sam’s heart lurched as one of the sentries reached for Rolo.

Sam was across the room in a heartbeat, grabbing for the back of the sentry’s neck, reaching _through_ it, and burning its central processor. Rolo’s spectral body scattered, and the other sentries in the room all stiffened, turning their weapons on the machinery around the room and opening fire as the druids cursed and flickered away, the medics taking shelter behind the computer bank.

Rolo stepped out of the sentries, which collapsed behind him, their eyes gone dark, and he doubled over.

“This is a lot more work than I expected it to be.”

Sam smiled weakly, squeezing Rolo’s shoulder, but there was no time to rest. They’d debated their strategy endlessly in the past week, Sam arguing caution and trying to convince Rolo not to act until Sam was the one in the lab. They both knew the druids were going to assume it was their patient lashing out. With luck, they would assume it was an instinctive response triggered by the pain or stress of the experiments, but that didn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be retribution.

 _You’ve been here longer,_ Rolo had pointed out. He rarely dug in his heels on anything, but this point seemed to be his limit. _If they’re going to assume either of us is deliberately screwing them it’ll be you. We can’t clue them in to how much control we have._

It was a fair point—though not a damning one, by any means. Sam suspected how they lashed out would be a far more important indicator than who it was the druids blamed. But having Rolo here did stack the deck just a little more in their favor.

It wasn’t that that had swayed Sam, though. It was that they’d taken him only once more—and not to this lab. To another lab he thought might be connected to the robeast’s dome, one where Rolo couldn’t reach him. Sam had tried to fight back there—he would _have_ to, if that was where the later stages of the experiment were going to happen—but the druids had hit him with something that had made him black out briefly, his mind hanging in nothingness, and when he came back to himself, the voice of the entity he’d seen within the robeast called out to him again. It had been all he could do not to get pulled in, and he’d spent the entire session oblivious to the world around him.

They still needed to wreck this lab, though. It would save Rax, and hopefully Rolo as well. It would delay their fate, at the very least.

Sam could still hear the entity from here. He heard it every time he came to the lab, and sometimes even in the cell, though its voice was faint there. He ignored it, scattering himself as Rolo had a moment ago. Fine manipulation was more difficult this way, but he could touch every piece of machinery in the room. He latched onto those that were still functional and pulled, wrenching movable pieces out of alignment, diverting power away from critical components. The lights in the room flickered, the medical staff cursed.

A druid reappeared in the center of the room, and for half a second Sam thought to turn the lab against her, to see if he could kill her before she realized what was happening.

He’d never killed before, though, and he hesitated. Just a moment, but it was long enough. She raised her hands, shaking back her sleeves, and black lightning gathered between her palms. Sam cried out, reaching forward as though he could somehow stop her, but she struck before he could do anything.

Lightning enveloped Rolo’s body, and he gasped, his spectral form dissipating as his eyes flew open and he screamed. The machines he’d been controlling went dark at once, and Sam had to stop himself from redoubling his attack. He wanted to—he wanted _desperately_ to bring the force of the Empire’s own creations down on the druid's head, but whatever she’d done, she’d known it would stop Rolo. If Sam gave himself away, it would ruin everything. The druids would know he and Rolo were far more competent enemies than they seemed, and any hope Rolo had of escaping their wrath would be gone.

So he watched, horrified and sick to his stomach, as Rolo writhed on the table, biting down on his lip to muffle his scream until violet blood streaked his chin. The druid let up for a moment, and the sound of Rolo’s ragged breathing filling the silence.

Then she began again, and this time Rolo couldn’t stop himself from screaming.

The sentries were right there. Sam could sense them, even without touching them, and he knew what their guns could do. All he had to do was take control of them. A single well-placed shot could put an end to this torture session.

And that would be the end of their fight. No more sneaking around in the lab, no more exploiting the druids’ ignorance. Sam and Rolo and Rax would be moved to more distant cells, far enough from the lab that even Sam couldn’t reach it, and the druids would watch over them when they were taken, ready to force their minds back into their bodies.

They’d taken a risk in enacting this strike; they’d both known that going in. With luck, they’d set the research back at least a little. With their machines destroyed and their files corrupted, the druids would have to start from scratch.

So Sam watched, however sick it made him to hear Rolo’s screams dissolve into weak pleas. It seemed to last forever, but eventually the druid tired of her game and called for new sentries to take Rolo. Sam was trembling, his form trying to scatter as the screams echoed in his ears, but he held himself together. Just until Rolo was back in the cell. Just until Sam could hold him and try to ease the pain. Then he would find a way to burn this place to the ground.

But they didn’t take Rolo back to the cell. In the corridor, they turned the opposite way, dragging Rolo’s sagging body behind them, and disappeared deeper into the lab. Sam strained to follow them, pushing himself farther than he’d gone before, farther than he’d gone when he first pushed himself into the robeast’s dome.

It wasn’t enough, and Sam was left straining as Rolo, the sentries, and the druids vanished around the next corner.

* * *

Allura was confused.

Not because she seemed to have misplaced her friends, as she wouldn’t have expected them to follow her into the astral plane adjacent to the Heart of the Black Lion. But the fact that she was here at all, when she should have been in Oriande— _that_ did confuse her.

“I don’t suppose you know what’s happening here?” Allura said to Black, who sat nearby, quiet and watchful. She seemed somehow distracted, her presence less solid than Allura thought it should have been—though she had only a few instances to compare to and something about this time was tangibly different. Perhaps because she’d come here through the tower rather than through Black.

Whatever the cause, Black didn’t respond to Allura’s question other than by projecting a sense of confusion and comfort. Strange though it was, Allura wasn’t in any _danger_ by being here—though she did have to wonder what had happened to the others. She supposed Val might have ended up in Blue’s Heart, and Matt in Red’s, but if Edi wasn’t here with Allura…

“You haven’t actually formed a bond with her yet,” Allura said. “You know she’ll likely be your next paladin, but you haven’t taken that step.”

 _**She is too young,** _ Black said simply.

Allura nodded. She sat on Black’s paw, trailing the toe of her boot in the shallow water around them and watching the reflected stars dance on the waves. Black said she’d been here for nearly a day already, though it felt closer to an hour by Allura’s measure. And it was true that the astral plane warped time while you were on it—but not by this much.

At least it wasn’t ten thousand years.

Allura shivered at the thought, restless energy propelling her to her feet. She began to pace, turning the problem over in her mind once more. “That tower was a gateway,” she said, “and we passed through it. I suppose it might not have connected to Oriande at all, but it didn’t _feel_ like the astral plane.” She turned on her heel, spraying up water. “So if the gate was meant to go to Oriande and it landed us elsewhere…” She stopped, tapping her chin. “Perhaps some sort of defenses added after the fact? To keep Zarkon from getting in?”

Or else Oriande no longer existed and the gate didn’t know where to take them. Allura banished the thought at once. Fligg had told them to come here. They’d been certain that it mattered, which meant that there had to be something there to find.

“So the question becomes how to get around this lock. If it was meant to keep Zarkon out… Do you suppose the sages might have found a way to shut out people you had bonded? Do you suppose it’s just me who got stuck?”

Black rumbled, seemingly offended by the suggested, and Allura soothed her.

“I’m not saying it’s your fault, but I can’t think what else would catch me in a trap meant for him. They obviously didn’t tune their lock to Galra, or to Zarkon’s own Quintessence. I suppose they might have locked out all paladins, but one would think they would realize some of us might need to come one day, after Voltron returned.”

_**Maybe they shut out everyone. They couldn’t know who Zarkon would hire to come in his stead.** _

That was true, unfortunately. Allura wrinkled her nose. “But if they did that, then it _must_ mean there’s some way around this.” She grunted. “I’ll need to think about this some more. Any luck finding Edi?”

Black rumbled, seemingly distracted. She’d been here waiting for Allura, and after realized how quickly time passed, Allura had asked her to check to see if she could pull Allura back through into her body—whether on Roya Vosar or inside Black’s cockpit.

No luck, unfortunately, so Allura had had Black turn her attention toward Edi. They might not be bonded yet, but Allura hoped Black might be able to locate her, assuming she’d landed elsewhere in the astral plane.

 _**Perhaps…** _ Black lifted her head, eyes glowing more brightly. She still seemed lethargic, her mind split between Allura’s predicament and something else. Something with Shiro, perhaps. Allura couldn’t get her to say what was bothering her.

Allura stepped back, expectant, as Black’s form thinned a little more, nearly winking out before solidifying once more.

_**I see her.** _

“She’s here, then? On the astral plane, I mean.”

Black rumbled. _**Lost. This place holds no form for her.**_

“She isn’t a paladin yet,” Allura pointed out. “Otherwise she’d be here.”

_**Mm. Our Hearts are not the only forces that shape this plane.** _

Allura stood up straighter, blinking. “They’re not?”

_**No. It is rare, but any strong presence can shape the ether. Ancient minds. Powerful energies. Balmera often take form here, and their people walk within them when they come here.** _

“I… I had no idea.”

Black seemed amused. _**You are not of this place. Of course you do not know all its secrets.**_

The sentiment was more than a little condescending, and Allura couldn’t help a surge of indignation—though of course, she couldn’t exactly argue the point. So she stood in sullen silence as Black withdrew again. Something shifted in the bond—not quite what Allura had felt when Black first established her bond with Shiro, but similar.

 _**There is no taking this back,** _ Black warned, returning with another presence in tow.

“Would you have changed your mind about her otherwise?” Allura asked.

Black didn’t answer, and Allura smiled, reaching out as a patch of stardust coalesced into a luminous form. The light intensified until Allura had to shield her eyes against the sting. It was like looking through a hole in the sky from a moonless night to midday.

The stardust scattered in the next instant, leaving Edi there, her hands clasped to her chest. She spotted Allura and promptly burst into tears.

Allura hurried forward, pulling her into a hug. “Shhh. It’s okay, Edi. You’re safe.”

“I didn’t know where you were,” Edi said, her voice shaking. “I was all alone and—and then someone was watching me.”

 _**Apologies,** _ Black said. _**That may have been me.** _

Edi jerked back from Allura, staring around with wide eyes. Her ears swiveled, and she turned toward Black, tearful eyes wide. “Did you just… talk to me?”

Black purred.

Allura rolled her eyes, but she supposed there was no point trying to hide the truth now. “Yes, she did. Black has been considering you as a future paladin for some time. It will take time for your bond to develop, but by starting the process now, she was able to pull you here, to the outer edges of her Heart.”

The very outer edges, from the look of it. Edi’s form was solid enough for Allura to touch her, but she was translucent, the backdrop of stars shining through her fur. Her eyes burned bright, though, especially wide as they were. She opened her mouth, glanced again at Black, and let out a squeak as she buried her face in Allura’s shoulder.

Allura laughed, patting the back of her head. “It’s all right, Edi. We’ve got plenty of time for you to get used to the idea before you need to do anything. In fact—why don’t you sit here and get to know Black. I’m going to see if I can figure out how to get us out of here.”

* * *

"You're sure it was Lealle?" Matt asked, his voice little more than a whisper.

Keith shrugged, leaning back against Red's paw. He and Matt sat side by side, looking out over the lava fields. "I mean... I was pretty messed up at the time so maybe I'm just confused, but... It sure as hell sounded like Alfor was her husband."

Matt bit at a thumbnail, looking worried. Not that Keith could blame him. He was worried, too. "They could have been talking about something else, though. Something innocent. Not--you know. Not the very end. Not betraying Alfor, just... stopping him. How long were they both paladins? There must have been times Alfor did something that upset them."

"I hope you're right," Keith said. And he meant it, though he couldn't stop the doubts that crept in. Nothing about the memory he'd glimpsed said he was witnessing Allura's own family fracturing down the center. But it  _felt_ like he'd witnessed a catastrophe. Maybe that was just Red's panic talking.

Sighing, Keith tilted his head back. "I know you don't want to talk about it," he said to Red. "But can you at least tell us if we need to be worried about this? She was Allura's _mom_."

Red rumbled, shying away from her paladins, as she had each time before when they'd asked her about the visions. She wouldn't say anything about them, but Keith knew they were her memories. He _thought_ they were her memories. They were connected to her somehow, and her reaction had to come from somewhere. It was odd that she had this memory of Lealle, though. He hadn't felt Red in that memory. It was fuzzy, but he'd gotten the impression Lealle and Zarkon were alone. But then... whose memory was it? Had Zarkon's memory bled through into Black and from her into Red?

"Please," Matt said, his voice breaking on the word. "I don't... I know this hurts, but once I get out of here, I'm going to have to face Allura. If her mom sided with Zarkon--What am I supposed to do with that?"

"But... Zarkon killed Lealle, didn't he? Why would he do that if they were on the same side?" Keith waited, but Red remained quiet. Keith rubbed his ear, feeling miserable. It was nice to be able to talk to Matt about it, at least, even if their lion was being less than helpful. He didn't know that he would have been able to talk to Lance about this, and Lance only shared a lion with Lealle.

With a sigh, Matt slumped backward, his legs stretched out beside Keith's so their toes knocked together whenever one of them shifted.

_**Lealle trusted Zarkon.** _

Keith's ears pricked up as Red at last broke her silence. She paused for a long moment, and he could feel her searching for words. That failing, she presented them with a series of images. Lealle dancing with Alfor, pranking Zarkon, fighting together with all the paladins and forming Voltron. Even second-hand and flickering past in rapid succession, Keith caught glimpses of the emotions that ran through those memories. Red's emotions, or Keturah's, for the most part, but Lealle's own joy and mischievousness was impossible to mistake. Some of the images he saw seemed to be filtered through the Blue Lion's eyes.

Was it Blue's memory, then? Maybe the problem ran deeper than Keith realized. Maybe Red's panic had been strong enough to set off Blue, and her memories had leaked through together with Red's.

The images slowed, showing scenes nearer the end. Zarkon withdrawing from the group. Alfor brushing off the paladins' concerns. Lealle had been especially worried, both about her husband and about Zarkon.

_**I don't know all of what happened that day. I wasn't there. But I know Lealle. She would never have tolerated the thing Zarkon has become.** _

"So then--" Keith groaned, tucking his knees against his chest. He didn't want to press Red. Really he didn't. She was too raw over whatever memories Zarkon's latest attack had dragged up. It could have been as simple as this attack reminding her that Zarkon had no qualms about killing his fellow paladins.

It could have been, but somehow Keith doubted that. This felt deeper, somehow. More raw.

It would all be so much easier if Red would just talk to them about it. But Keith knew too well how hard some things were to face, and he wasn't going to be the one to drag old wounds back into the open. Even if the questions clawed at his mind and twisted his stomach up in knots.

"You trusted Lealle," he said.

_**Yes.** _

"To the very end?"

_**Yes. She deserved a better fate.  
** _

Keith's mouth ran dry. "Yeah."

Matt squeezed his shoulder, offering a sad smile. "That's good enough for me."

Red's gratitude wrapped around them, warm and sorrowful, and she formed the image of a cat twining around its owner's legs. _**I will tell you someday,**_ she said. _**When it hurts less. I will try.**_

"Take your time," Matt said, pressing his hand to the top of her paw. "You know we're always here for you."

If Matt felt strange comforting a ten-thousand-year-old robot, he didn't show it, and Keith offered his own silent commiseration. He wasn't as good at this as Matt was, but he _did_ understand that Red was hurting, and he _did_ want her to feel safe.

It was just hard for Keith to find the right words to say. Hard to know when to push and when to back off, especially when the things left unspoken felt like towering beasts waiting to pounce.

He was saved having to figure out how to put his conflicting emotions into words by a sudden flash of light, followed by the crackle of shifting lava, a sharp intake of breath, and a short, strangled scream.

Keith launched to his feet, pulse pounding, and sprinted toward the sound with Matt close behind. They found Val just over the next rise, scrambling backwards with a look on her face like she was preparing to scream in agony but hadn't quite decided if it was worth the effort. She stared around her, lifted her hand to scrutinize the palm, then turned toward Matt and Keith, relief crashing across her face.

"Oh, thank god. Why the _hell_ are you two hanging out in a sea of lava?"

Matt cracked a smile, lifting one shoulder apologetically. "Apparently that's just what Red's Heart looks like?"

Val blinked, her mouth forming an 'o' as Matt picked his way across the lava--unsteady enough that even he had to extend his arms to the side to keep his balance. He held out a hand to her, hauling her to her feet, and she finally laughed.

"Leave it to the Reds to be the most extra."

"Hey, I didn't pick the locale," he said, wrinkling his nose. "At least the lava doesn't burn, though. It's kinda fun to walk on, too." He jumped a few times to prove his point, the lava sinking beneath his weight. The blackened crust on top stretched thin in a few places, red light showing through.

Val edged away from him, eyeing him like she wasn't sure if she wanted to trust a word he said. She opted not to engage, apparently, and turned instead toward Keith, one eyebrow artfully arched. The expression looked shockingly like Lance, and Keith wondered how he'd never noticed how similar they were.

"Are you coming with to Oriande now, or what?"

Keith frowned. "I don't think so? I just wanted to talk to Red, and she brought me here. Figured I'd keep Matt company for a while, since he went and got himself lost without me."

Matt stopped jumping on the lava and scowled at Keith. "Hey! That totally wasn't my fault."

"Hate to agree with you there," Val said, "but you're absolutely right. I don't know how we all ended up on the astral plane, but I don't think it's anything we did. Or... you aren't the only one who screwed up, anyway."

"Gee, thanks."

Val flicked a two-fingered salute his direction, then turned toward Keith, her smile growing coy. " _So..._ How are things with Lance? You two still blush every time you touch pinkies?"

Keith turned on his heel and walked back toward Red, heat creeping into his cheeks. "Okay, I'm done here. Ready to take me back to the homeworld?"

Red's amusement was tangible--mingling with Matt's laughter until Keith couldn't stop his ears from flicking in embarrassment.

"You'll have to call Matt later and gossip!" Val called. "I promise I won't be lurking in the shadows and laughing at you both!"

Keith's ears lay back, and Val laughed, but Red finally relented, whisking him away before he had to suffer any more humiliation.

* * *

"A test?" Allura mused, watching the stars dance on the rippling water around her. More time had passed; guessing how much time was pointless. Allura suspected she'd physically stepped into the astral plane when she passed through the tower--not something she'd realized was possible, and something which made all her knowledge about the astral plane moot. Anything at all might be possible here, and a slight warping of time was a minor shift in the grand scheme of things.  
  
Edi still sat on Black's paw, and though she'd fallen silent some time ago, Allura didn't think for a moment that she was actually asleep. She may have been speaking with Black mentally--though Allura doubted the bond had progressed to that point quite yet. She may have been thinking of Matt and Val, who, logic said, must have been similarly isolated in the Hearts of their respective lions. She may simply have been watching Allura, waiting for her to figure out their next step.  
  
She perked up now when Allura turned around, trying to look more sure of herself than she felt.  
  
"Did you figure it out?" Edi asked, rubbing her eyes as she sat upright on Black's paw. "You know what's going on?"  
  
"Not entirely," Allura admitted. "But I might have an idea. The sages have always been selective about who they let into Oriande." So the stories said, at least. Allura knew nothing first-hand, and she wasn't sure how far she could trust the legends. "I can only assume they tightened their security after Zarkon turned against us."  
  
"Okay..." Edi slid off Black's paw, splashing down into the shallow water beneath them. Stars rippled, and Allura suddenly wished she didn't feel quite so much like she was going into this blind. "So what sort of people do they let in?"  
  
"Originally, only Alteans, though there are plenty of stories of Alteans bringing companions along when they visited. And if the tower is the checkpoint, then it's not especially selective. All you need is someone with the ability to direct their Quintessence into the tower. To turn the key, you might say. Galra likely couldn't do that, except the druids, I suppose. Humans wouldn't be able to do it without training in the Pygnarat arts. But either Shay or Ryner likely could have done what I did."  
  
Edi scrunched up her nose. "That doesn't sound very selective at all."  
  
"Exactly." Allura tapped her chin, running back through the arguments she'd had with herself since Black had brought Edi through. "Which is why this part must be a test of some sort." The tower prevented anyone from accidentally passing through to Oriande, and it stopped Zarkon himself from entering, but the sages must have realized he could easily hire someone to open the gate for him, even if they didn't know about Haggar and her druids.  
  
The only question, then, was what they were looking for now. Allura had spent quite some time trying to list all the qualities which might set an honest pilgrim apart from Zarkon and his people, whether some personal trait, some power or bond, some knowledge... She'd realized after entirely too long that Zarkon might not be the only one the sages wished to keep out.  
  
"There's no way we can know what they want," she murmured, kicking one foot so glimmering droplets fanned out in front of her.  
  
"What?"  
  
Allura turned toward Edi, smiling. "Nothing. I'm not sure what we're supposed to do exactly, but Fligg saw something important for us on Oriande, so it must be possible for us to get through. The first thing to do is to find our friends."

"How do we do that?"

How, indeed? The Hearts of the Lions were all connected; Allura knew that much. She wasn't sure _how_ they were connected, or how one might pass from one to the next. But this was Voltron, if not exactly as Allura was used to interacting with it. The bonds between paladin and lion held true here, and it had led Black to Edi. Surely the bonds between paladins also persisted in this space.

Allura closed her eyes, reaching out for the others. It would have been easier with Shiro here to help her. The two of them together with Black could have sensed the others on the astral plane just as they could sense their team in the physical world. Allura didn't have Shiro's help in this, of course, and Edi wasn't nearly ready to try syncing with Allura.

But Matt and Val were still her team. Whichever plane they found themselves on, they were still her team. Allura held fast to that knowledge and reached out with her mind, searching for familiar presences. At first, there was nothing, but then Allura caught faint echoes, almost as though someone were speaking far away. She couldn't make sense of the whispers, but she recognized them just the same. Val and Matt and, for a brief instant before he disappeared, Keith.

That puzzled her, but she didn't dwell on it. She reached instead, impressing her mind on Matt and Val as she would have if she'd been flying with Shiro. Both Matt and Val perked up at once, surprise yielding quickly to recognition.

Even as Allura tried to figure out how to get to where they were, they appeared before Allura in a flash of light. Matt staggered, but Val only bent her knees, beaming as she straightened up.

"Okay, that's actually not so bad when you're not landing on lava or launching yourself into the air."

"Lava?" Allura asked, concerned.

Matt caught his balance on Allura's arm and frowned at Val. "Launching yourself into the air?"

Val waved a hand. "Long story. I'll tell you later." She folded her hands and pointed both index fingers at Allura. "Any idea what the hell's going on?"

"We're on the astral plane," she said.

"In the Heart of the Lions." Matt nodded. "This is Black's?"

"Yes." Allura hesitated, wondering whether anyone but a black paladin had ever stepped into this place. Black didn't seem put out by Matt or Val's presence, though, so Allura put the philosophical questions aside for later. "I suspect this is some kind of test, but I'm not sure yet how we're supposed to pass it."

Matt ran his fingers through his hair, pursing his lips. "If it's a test, maybe there are proctors?" He took two steps back and cupped his hands around his mouth. "Hey! Anybody out there? I'd like a copy of the rubric, please!" He waited a few seconds, then shrugged. "Okay, so much for that plan. What's next?"

Allura suppressed a smile. "I'm not sure yet. It's possible the sages wanted a full team of paladins to come."

"So we need to come back later?" Val asked. "That's lame."

Allura sighed. "Unfortunately, without some other sign of what to do, I don't see that we have much choice."

"Would it help to go back to the tower?" Val asked. "Or, well, I'm assuming that's the same tower."

Allura straightened up. "The tower is _here_? On the astral plane?"

"Yes...?" Val glanced from Allura to Matt, and then to Edi. "Did... Did none of you see it except me?"

Matt shook his head, and Edi just shrugged. "I didn't see anything until Allura and Black found me."

Val furrowed her brow, then held out her hands, one toward Matt, one toward Allura. "Okay, let's see if I can find it again. I couldn't get away from it for the longest time, so it shouldn't be too hard."

Allura took her hand and pulled Edi close, frowning all the while. "How are you able to navigate in here?"

"Bilocation-lite?" Val shrugged. "I just kinda wandered, and then when I went for my magic, things got weird. It's kind of hard to control, though. I'm surprised I didn't drop me and Matt into a patch of brambles when I tried to come to you." Matt eyed her suspiciously, pulling his hand back. Val huffed and snatched it in her own, then closed her eyes. "Okay. Last I saw it, it was on an island in the middle of the ocean. Come on, magic, don't fail me now."

Val's words conjured an image in Allura's mind: a verdant island, bordered by golden beaches and sapphire water, with a mountain rising from the forest. No, not a mountain. A volcano. Val made a questioning noise, but her Quintessence was already rousing, slippery and thin as it weaved around them. Black's Heart vanished, and they landed on an island--the same island Allura had pictured in her mind--halfway up the slope of a smoldering volcano, with stars overhead and a lush forest below and a broad swatch of pale sand at the shoreline. Val was frowning, but she nodded toward a cliff up ahead where the tower stood, a little cleaner than it had been in the physical world, without so much ivy clinging to the stone, but unmistakably the same.

Allura hurried over, pressing her hands against the tower wall. The echoes of past magic were strong here, and Allura's Quintessence slid easily into the space left behind. Once more for an instant when she finished the pattern, she felt herself tugged by the Quintessence waiting on the other side of the tower--but this time the tower didn't become a pillar of light. Instead, a door appeared in the wall, small and nondescript. It glowed briefly, and then the astral plane quieted, all traces of Quintessence scattering to the winds.

"Do we trust it?" Matt asked.

Val shrugged. "It's that or stay here forever."

Edi nodded, and Allura grasped the handle, breathing in deeply before steeling herself and opening the door.

The astral plane faded in a heartbeat, and Allura found herself standing in a small, comfortable room, a fire blazing in the hearth and white robes hanging in a wardrobe by the wall. Two Alteans dressed in the same white robes stood beside the hearth, their _glaes_ more extensive than any Allura had seen, tracing intricate patterns across their faces.

"Greetings, paladins of Voltron," one of the Alteans said, bowing low. "Welcome to Oriande. We have been waiting."


	24. Nameless

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Hunk and Shay are preparing for their Unity. In the mean time, they've begun to compile information on other Balmera in hopes of gathering a Migration that could provide a stronger defense for Shay's people. Keith, Lance, and Thace, meanwhile, have struck an uneasy truce with the homeworld rebellion--though Keith has been away for most of a day speaking with Red and, via the astral plane, with Matt (and Val, briefly.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick note that there won't be an update next week. What was supposed to be the (singular) next chapter is looking like it's going to end up as three chapters (oops?), and I need to take a little extra time to make sure I get the pacing right and don't skip anything important. I'll be back again as soon as I can with the next update!
> 
> Trigger warnings: Body modification and implied medical horror. Nothing happens directly on screen, but the after-effects imply enough that it's still worth a warning. The scene in question begins, "It was nearly a full day..." To skip the most direct implications, stop reading at, "That was less than comforting," and jump back in with, "They fell into silence..."
> 
> The notes at the end of the chapter include a short summary of the scene for those of you who may need to skip all or part of it, or for those who would like more information before diving into that scene.

"You two need anything in here?"

Hunk looked up as his mom leaned her head into the small chamber where he and Shay had set up. She was still practically glowing with delight--both his moms were, the two of them flitting around from task to task. They'd been on the Balmera for three days now, and they were still giddy. Hell, Hunk was still giddy, and whenever his mind brushed up against Shay's, her excitement rekindled his own.

They were going to declare Unity.

Part of him still couldn't believe it. It had all happened in such a rush that it felt like a dream. He was almost grateful for Zarkon's attack on the summit because it made everything feel more balanced. More real. It had been a sobering moment, but they'd pulled through. All the delegates were back home safe, Shiro seemed to have recovered from whatever blow Zarkon had dealt to him and Black, and things were basically back to normal.

"Normal," in Hunk and Shay's case, being an intensive dive into the records Pidge had pulled for them from the green paladins' database.

"I'm doing okay," Hunk said, smiling at his mom. "Shay?"

She hummed, skimming to the end of a file before she shook herself and looked up. "I am well. Thank you."

Lana shifted her weight, resting a hand on her hip. "All right... I'm trusting you two not to overwork yourselves, you know."

Hunk laughed, leaning back and stretching his hands over his head. Balmerans didn't use chairs often; the few they had were made of solid rock and among the least comfortable things Hunk had ever sat on, so he'd devised his own alternative--a curved hollow in the wall lined with moss and blankets he'd pulled from Yellow's storage. The end result felt a little bit like an old mattress whose springs had lost their bounce. Still not the most comfortable place in the world, but a marked improvement.

"Thanks," he said, setting his tablet face-down on his lap and flashing his mom a smile. "I think we're just about ready to take a break anyway. Meet you back in the common chamber in twenty and I'll help Mama get a start on dinner?"

Lana's smile was fond, and she came over to give him a kiss on the head. "Twenty minutes," she said. "I'll be back then if you haven't showed your face."

"That is wise, I think," Shay said, lifting her own tablet to hide her smile. She crouched beside Hunk's seat, close enough that he could read over her shoulder. Close enough that she could lean her head against his arm, as she did occasionally. Each time she did, it pulled Hunk out of his reading for a solid five minutes as the reminder of their engagement flooded his system with adrenaline. They hadn't picked a date for the ceremony yet; Lance had promised to try to get away from things on the homeworld soon, but they were still on rocky footing with the rebellion, and Hunk still hadn't been able to get a hold of Matt, Val, and Allura. Soon, though. "It is too easy to get lost in this project--for Hunk especially."

"Don't I know it." Lana shook her head, then bent and kissed Shay's forehead, winning a shy smile in return. "All right. I'll be back."

Hunk called an acknowledgment, even as he turned his focus back to his tablet. Until now, Pidge hadn't had a reason to search for the locations of the other Balmera under Zarkon's control, though they'd promised to look for that the next time they had a chance. For now, there was plenty of incidental information to sort through.

That was what Hunk and Shay were doing now. After mulling it over and discussing it with the other Elders, Shay had reluctantly admitted that they didn't have the tools to seek out other free Balmera. Without a starting point or the memory of ancient navigational techniques, they would be roaming blind, and it might be generations before they crossed paths with anyone. For now, then, they would focus on freeing the Balmera they could find. Even with what they already had to work with, they'd identified the general locations of three or four Balmera, though only one listed specific coordinates.

"I've only got two more files to get through," Hunk said, marking the current one as read and moving on. "How are you coming?"

"I am close," Shay said. "A break will be welcome, however. It is not easy to read what they have done to others of my people."

Hunk reached down to take her hand, his heart aching for her. It was hard for _him_ to get through some of these files; he could only imagine how much worse it was for Shay. Zarkon was always merciless, but with Balmera there was an extra layer of cruelty. Zarkon didn't register these people as prisoners; he often didn't register them as _people_ at all. Balmera were a power source, and the operations he set up to mine them were machines he expected to run themselves indefinitely--which meant whenever something came up that slowed production, the overseers had free reign to get things back on track, no matter the cost to the Balmerans.

"I'm glad we're doing this," he said. "We can put a stop to this. It'll be slow at first, but we're going to get these people out from under Zarkon's thumb."

Shay nodded. "It is a worthy aim," she said. "Still... I cannot help but worry about where this will carry us. Zarkon depends on the Balmera to power his empire. Once he knows our intent, he will move to counter us. You know this to be true. A few months from now, how many troops will he have brought in to defend the remaining Balmera? I will not say that we should not act, for my people have suffered for far too long already, but I cannot pretend that our actions will not make things worse, at least for a time, before this is through."

"Then we'll have to do everything we can to mitigate that damage." Hunk scrolled quickly through the file before him--a proposal on how to use Balmera crystals more efficiently. It didn't appear to mention any specific Balmera, so Hunk closed out of it and brought up the last file, a chart tracking productivity on several Balmera in the Phaorle Quadrant. The file named a dozen Balmera, but gave no indication of where they were located.

Frowning, Hunk flagged the file to be reviewed at a later date. Pidge would check it when they had a chance, and hopefully they would be able to track down more information on those Balmera.

For now, there was nothing more to add to the list. Hunk closed out of the file, drummed his fingers on his tablet, and considered the issue of backlash. They would have to think about it. Caution might serve them well--move slowly, strike quietly, spread out their attacks so no one person ever saw the immediate fallout for more than one, and they might delay the moment Zarkon realized Voltron was going after his power source.

Or was it better to strike hard and fast? They'd gotten good at cleaning up Galra these last few months, sometimes liberating two or three targets a week. If they kept up that pace with the Balmera--if they _could_ \--they might make it to dozens of Balmera before Zarkon had a chance to organize his defenses.

"The others will still be pushing forward on their fronts, too," Hunk pointed out as he and Shay packed up for the night and headed out to where their parents were waiting. This tunnel was quiet tonight, and Hunk, hyper aware of how well sound carried in here, dropped his voice low. "Zarkon's already running short on crystals to power his ships. If we take away even more while the others keep targetting his ships, he might not be able to send anyone else to help him hold the Balmera." Or at least he'd have to sacrifice other targets. And while, okay, one could argue that that might balance out to more lives saved in the long run, it felt too much like using the Balmera as bait for Hunk to comfortably call it win-win.

But he couldn't deny that the Balmera held considerable strategic value for both sides.

Shay hummed, thoughtful. "Perhaps. But as the number of Balmera under his power dwindles, he will surely lean harder on those he retains to try to make up for the lost productivity. They are already balancing on an edge; if he pushes much harder, they will not survive for long."

"Then we'll have to be fast. Once Zarkon realizes what we're up to, the timer starts. Maybe at that point, we can convince Shiro and Allura to bring the entire Coalition to bear. Wipe out Zarkon's power supply in one last push. That'll help everyone, so our allies might actually go for it--even the ones that like to drag their feet."

Shay nodded thoughtfully. "That may work," she said. "And I suppose we have some time to determine the details of our plan. Freeing one Balmera did not provoke much of a response from the Empire. With luck, freeing a few more will be much the same."

"And after we see the setup on a few other Balmera, we'll have a better idea what we're dealing with. If they all have the same basic defensive array, maybe we'll find a weakness to exploit in the future."

Shay's song was brighter now, determination flickering at the edges of Hunk's awareness. There was even a bounce in her step as she pulled ahead of him, speeding toward the common chamber. Things on the Balmera had quieted down at last, Shay's circle settling back into relative peace and the Elders making steady progress at the Meets. The Olkari team had arrived yesterday, and Shay said the other Elders were impressed with them. Olkari, apparently, could sense the Balmera's mind a little bit, and the Balmera herself was quite fond of them.

That had soothed most fears, so although the Olkari engineers were taking things slow, Shay was optimistic about eventually having a functional defensive grid in place. The main holdup right now was that the Olkari wanted to test a few small systems to see how the Balmera reacted--they were considering a few different power systems and were waiting to see how various plants grew on the Balmera's surface. Plants, they'd figured, would be a preferable foundation and scaffolding for the defensive grid, rather than the metal structures they used elsewhere, which still reminded the Elders too much of Galra tech.

It was a smart move on the Olkari's part, and Shay was optimistic. On top of that, she now only had to spend an hour or two at Meets each day, rather than the ten or twelve she'd been putting in at first.

Her parents were both nearly back to full strength by now, and they were laughing with Hunk's moms in the common chamber when Hunk and Shay finally arrived. Hunk's giddiness returned at the sight of them all, laughing and talking like old friends. Shay's mother was teaching Hunk's mom how to spin the coarse, stringy fibers gathered from cave moss into threads that could then be used in weaving tunics, blankets, and other textiles. Meanwhile Shay's father and Hunk's mama were gathered around a cookpot, swapping recipes and experimenting with traditional Balmeran recipes.

Hunk had been pleasantly surprised to find that his parents didn't mind trying the bugs that were Balmerans' main source of protein, even if neither of them were particularly enthusiastic about eating them whole.

Lana looked up from her spinning and beamed at Hunk, waving him over, and Hunk gave her a hug and oohed over her thread, some of which she'd already dyed. She was determined to make a blanket to give to Hunk and Shay on their day of Unity, though she'd already apologized for her technique.

Hunk didn't care about technique. It was enough to see his family and Shay's together like this--so warm and easy that they made it feel like the most natural thing in the world. Leaving Shay to offer her own advice on handling the moss, Hunk went to join his mama to see what new creations she had devised.

* * *

Keith lingered in the Red Lion for some time after he returned to his body. At first, he could justify it as an adjustment period. His head felt fuzzy after being away for so long, and he genuinely wasn't up for an hours-long flight back to the 301.

But if he was being honest, it was more than practical concerns that kept him here. Partially, it was concern for Red. She was much calmer now than she'd been in the immediate aftermath of Zarkon's attack. There was still a twinge of pain, but she reached out to him when he cautiously prodded their bond, as though to reassure him that they were okay. Whatever it was that was bothering her, the things she wasn't ready to talk about yet, they shouldn't worry him. She was still here. She would still support him.

Slowly his concern for her drained away, and then it was loneliness that held him back. Not that Lance wasn't waiting for him back in the city, but Keith hadn't had nearly long enough with Matt--though Red's systems showed him he'd been gone most of the day. It hadn't felt like nearly that long, and Keith kept wondering if he could go back.

But those were all excuses, and he knew it. The reason he kept dragging his feet was simply that he didn't want to have to face Arel and the rest of the rebellion again. Their first meeting with Mirek was a blur, and Keith had left so quickly afterward that he still wasn't entirely clear on where they stood, but he knew that even a formal alliance wouldn't be enough to make Arel forget his grudge.

The sun hovered just over the horizon by the time Keith dragged himself out of Red's cockpit, back down to the small speeder he'd brought out this way. It felt even more cramped this time, and he hesitated for a long while, shivering in the cold, before he bid a silent farewell to Red, wheeled around, and struck out back toward the city.

The night was half gone by the time he made it back to the apartment, but Lance was waiting for him in the main room, wrapped up in a blanket and dozing on the couch Thace used for a bed.

"He was worried about you," Thace said, neutral, from the kitchen table. He had a screen pulled up on either side of him, the light washing his skin in pale blue light, and he hardly looked up as he spoke. "You should let him know you're back, and then you should both get some sleep. We have a long day ahead of us."

Keith fought the urge to snap at him—was Thace planning on taking his own advice, or was it only Keith who needed coddling?

But he was tired and sore and a fight would only keep him awake for longer, so he huffed and leaned a knee on the couch beside Lance. "Hey," he whispered, touching Lance's shoulder.

Lance startled awake at once, his eyes blearily searching Keith's face for a long moment before recognition settled in. Once it did, he relaxed, hand swatting the blanket aside so he could grab Keith by the collar and pull him down on top of him. "How'd it go?"

"Fine," Keith said, squirming. "I guess Zarkon's attack reminded Red of something from before. She's not ready to talk about it yet, but she's doing better. I talked to Matt, too..." He trailed off, frowning as Lance closed his eyes and relaxed back against the arm of the couch. "Wouldn't you rather sleep on a real bed?"

"Too much work. 'm _tired_. Plus, you're warm." Lance wriggled underneath Keith, sinking deeper into the couch cushions as though to prove a point.

As point of fact, Keith was definitely _not_ warm. The flight back had been even colder than the flight out, without even the weak sunlight to mitigate the chill. Keith’s fingers were frozen solid, and Lance yelped when he pressed them to his neck.

Keith laughed, releasing some of his tension, as Lance glared at him. Staying here on the couch with Lance did sound tempting, but Thace was still sitting up at the kitchen table. He hadn't given any sign that he resented Lance stealing his bed, but Keith figured it was kind of rude. Anyway, he doubted he'd be able to sleep with his uncle watching.

Lance whined when Keith rolled off the couch, and he pulled back the blanket to give Keith a disappointed look. Keith just grinned and picked Lance up, blanket and all. Lance yelped, flailing, then latched onto Keith's neck when he almost contorted right out of Keith’s arms.

"You said you were tired," Keith said innocently as Lance glared at him. "Relax. I'm just taking you to your own bed."

Lance huffed, but he stayed still as Keith carried him back and dumped him unceremoniously on the bed. Lance yelped, struggling with the blanket, which had twisted about him, rendering him all but immobile. “You’re so _mean,_ Keith,” he whined, kicking a few times and managing precisely nothing.

Keith only smiled, forgetting the chill of the wastelands for the moment. “Get some sleep, Lance. It’s late.”

He turned to go, but Lance finally managed to free his arm, and he grabbed Keith’s hand, pulling him to a stop. And--well, it _was_ late, and Keith _was_ cold. It would take an hour for his own bed to warm up to a comfortable temperature, but if he were to leech someone else’s body heat… Smiling, Keith kicked off his boots and changed into Lance's spare pajamas before crawling into the bed beside Lance.

It said something about how tired he was, physically and otherwise, that he didn't wait for Lance to latch onto him. Instead, Keith scooted close as soon as he was horizontal, throwing an arm across Lance's chest and burying his face in the bend of Lance's neck. Lance's breath faltered for a moment, and then he exhaled. Even that sound somehow conveyed fondness, and Keith released a breath he didn't know he’d been holding. Lance shifted a bit, repositioning his arm that was pinned between them and pulling Keith closer.

Keith was out before he had a chance to worry about tomorrow.

* * *

Balmera R-27-Arl had stagnated in a remote region of Imperial airspace, near a dwarf star that was slowly burning itself out.

Even from what little they had been able to pull from Pidge's files, Shay's heart already ached for this Balmera and her people. She had hoped, at first, that the Balmera was healthier than her own had been before Voltron's arrival, if only because she produced more crystals than Shay's ever had. Seeing her now, from halfway across the system and filtered through Yellow's scanners, Shay knew it wasn't good health that produced so many crystals. She was a larger Balmera, and perhaps she hosted a larger population of Balmerans.

And she was dying.

This Balmera--Shay's mind automatically supplied the Empire's designation, which was the only concise way they had to distinguish between one Balmera and another, but her stomach turned over each time she thought it. She would need to find a better system, once these people were safe. She wondered if the Balmera had once had names.

A question for later.

This Balmera, whatever her name was, was sickly. Her Quintessence fluctuated on the scanners, but it remained dangerously low, and it was not only the surface that was devoid of life, but even the outermost tunnels that Yellow's scans could reach.

"We must reach the surface," Shay said. "I suspect the mines have delved very deep into her core. We will not learn much from the air."

Hunk's resolved settled into her chest. "All right,” Hunk said, his voice hollow over the comms as he wiggled into a maintenance space. “Take us in whenever you're ready. I'll see if I can't redirect some power to the cloaking device. Buy us a few more minutes."

Yellow rumbled approval, nudging Hunk toward some of her weapons systems--she was loathe to use them here even if it came to a battle, so she did not mind sacrificing them in the name of a quiet approach. Shay left them to it, tracing Hunk's progress with half a mind as she eased them closer, alert for signs that the Galra had noticed her approach.

The skies remained clear, however, and by the time Hunk was finished with his modificiations, Shay was eager to get moving. She activated the cloak and brought them in, noting ground-based defenses, hangars, and other Galra structures on the surface--all quiet. The scans detected only a small crew here, and none of them them grew more active as the Yellow Lion passed.

The instant Yellow's paws touched stone, Shay's mind raced outward into the song. An unfamiliar song, and one that left her feeling light-headed for a moment as her voice struck a dissonant chord.

The reaction was immediate: a wave of shocked silence, followed soon after by a clamor of questions. Shay sat back in her seat as Hunk approached, shaking his head as though he, too, had caught some of the chaos. It was difficult to make sense of this song. At its core it was the same, and the intent behind the melodies was clear enough in most cases, but the finer details were lost.

 _I am Shay._ She held the words in her mind, singing of her home and her people and trying to convey that she had come to help--that she _could_ help. She just needed to know the situation.

It took several repetitions before Shay's meaning came through. She modulated to match this song as best she could, and the voices singing back to her quieted to an uneasy hum as one--an Elder, she assumed--sang simple, direct responses to Shay's questions. It was a slow process, but they made it work.

It struck Shay that she might well be the first Balmeran in thousands of years to sing another Balmera's song--a thought that was at once breathtaking and sobering. Hunk laid a hand on her shoulder, humming his sympathy in a low voice, and Shay smiled at him, then focused on the task at hand.

Zarkon had been in power here for far too long. It ended today.

* * *

Keith woke slowly the next day, pulling his pillow closer and--

Wait.

That wasn't a pillow.

Keith came fully awake in an instant, the events of yesterday flooding back in, and he froze, hardly daring to move on the off chance that Lance hadn't yet woken up and didn't realize Keith had been hugging him like a child's toy.

The laugh in his ear told him that he was not, in fact, that lucky, and he slowly pulled back to look at Lance, whose lopsided smile and unruly hair was altogether too endearing for so early in the morning. Keith groaned and pulled an actual pillow over his head to hide the mortified quiver in his ears.

"Morning, babe," Lance said, planting a kiss on the hand clutching the pillow. "I never knew you were so cuddly. Deep sleeper, too, apparently."

Keith groaned again, rolling onto his back to put space between them. "Sorry. Did I wake you up?"

"Once or twice." Lance's tone was dismissive, and he tugged at the corner of Keith's pillow. "Hey. Keith. Babe. Honeydew. Sunshine." One final tug pulled the pillow out of Keith's hands. He chased after it for an instant, then stopped himself and reluctantly met Lance's eyes. Lance smiled. "Hey."

"Hey..."

"Can I tell you a secret?"

Keith raised an eyebrow, turning on his side and pulling his knees up to his chest as Lance propped himself up on an elbow. "Sure, I guess."

"When Mateo was little, he was scared of waking up our parents when he had a nightmare. Thought they would be mad or something, I don't know." Lance flipped his hand, then settled it on Keith's waist, the touch so casual, yet so intimate, that it stole Keith's breath. "Anyway, there was, like, an entire year where he only ever came to me when he had a nightmare. I'd calm him down, and he'd spend the rest of the night in my bed. And he kicks. So believe me, waking up because my boyfriend's trying to snuggle closer in his sleep is a pretty cool reason to wake up in the middle of the night."

Keith offered a tentative smile. "Still, I'm sorry. We have a mission today... right?" He huffed, throwing an arm over his head. "Ugh, sorry. I haven't been helping very much with this whole rebellion thing, have I?"

"Your lion comes first," Lance said. "You know if it was Blue, I'd be exactly the same."

Keith let his arm slide off his face, peering at Lance over his bent elbow. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." Lance flopped down beside him, one leg poking out from under the covers. "Think Thace would murder us if we just... stayed here for five minutes or an hour?"

Keith snorted. "We can maybe get away with ten minutes. Catch me up on everything I missed?"

Lance's head rolled to the side, and he smiled. "Wow, Keith. That's some pillow talk right there. Be still my heart."

Keith smacked Lance in the face with his pillow, then rolled out of bed, laughing as Lance latched onto him, holding fast to the point that he almost fell off the bed as Keith headed for the bathroom. He lay there, moping, as Keith got ready, but eventually caved and filled in the details of what Keith had missed between the flashbacks, the frantic call to Shiro, and the impromptu roadtrip to see Red. Keith hadn't missed as much as he thought--a long, tense conversation with Mirek that had ended with an uneasy alliance. Another, even longer talk yesterday while Keith was gone.

"We're running a job with them today," Lance explained twenty minutes later as Thace parked their shuttle near a food stand--one of a million places in the 301 that tried to make nutrient paste a little more appetizing. "We're meeting the intel officer here, and they'll fill us in on the details. Thace says we'll probably have to run a few of these before we make any real progress. Apparently brutes like us are supposed to just do as we're told."

"What?" Keith frowned at Lance, then at Thace, who sighed.

"That's how it's structured," he explained in a low voice. "They appreciate that the nature of their work sometimes requires an indelicate approach, but the guard force, if you will, makes up the lowest tier of their command structure. The argument is once you yield to violence, you never give alternatives their due consideration."

Keith scoffed. "Seriously? Says who?"

Lance's face darkened, and he nodded to the line at the food cart. Arel was at the head of the line, ordering a bowl of something lumpy and pungent, and Keith's steps slowed as soon as he recognized him. Keith didn’t recognize the man and woman behind Arel, but from the man’s caution and the woman’s predatory grace—not to mention the way both deferred to Arel—Keith suspected they’d both been part of the team that had captured him along with Thace and Lance.

"Vrekt," Keith muttered. "Are you serious?"

"Patience," Thace hissed. "I doubt they'll stay with us for the job itself. This is just a briefing. Just survive it and we'll be on our way."

Easier said than done. Keith balled his hands into fists at his side and lagged behind the other two as they crossed the street. Arel looked up at their approach, his lips pursing. Well, at least he wasn't enjoying this any more than the rest of them.

Arel muttered something Keith couldn't pick out, and the woman at his shoulder elbowed him hard enough to make him stagger. She seemed to be only a few years older than Arel, tall and lithe, while their third companion was a stout furless man with wrinkles around his eyes.

The man stepped forward, nodding politely to Thace, and then to Lance and Keith. "Thace drul Vesely," he said, voice just soft enough not to carry to the couple still in line at the food cart. "I had heard you'd left the army. I'll admit I'm glad you're on our side."

" _If_ he's on our side," Arel muttered.

The man ignored Arel's comment and turned to Keith. "And Keith drul Vorsek, one of Zarkon's own Princes."

"Don't call me that."

The man blinked. "Oh. Of course. You've discarded your rank, as well."

"No," Keith said, ignoring the silent pressure of Lance’s gaze on the side of his head. "That name. I'm just Keith now."

Arel perked up, a gleam entering his eye, and Keith swallowed a groan. Vrekt. He shouldn’t have said anything. It just rankled, hearing his father’s name after he’d worked so hard to discard it. Aside from Shiro, who’d known Keith-the-Galra-Prince, and Matt, who had the unfair advantage of sharing Keith’s brain, none of the others had ever heard Keith’s full name. He’d hoped it would stay that way.

The older man only bowed his head. "Keith, then. And--I believe your name is Lance Mendoza."

"That's me! You can call me Sharpshooter if you like. I don’t mind." Lance fired off a finger gun at the Galra woman--Keith was pretty sure that was pure reflex at this point--but then hesitated. "Are you sure we should be talking here?"

"Lok's one of ours," Arel said, puffing up. "We're safe here--assuming you aren't planning on selling us out, of course."

" _Arel_." The woman sighed, putting a hand on Arel's head and forcing him down onto a bench. "Ignore him," she said to Lance. "He's been in a sour mood all morning. My name is Myta. This is Rhem, and of course you've already met Arel."

"You'll be briefing us, then?" Thace asked.

Myta nodded. "We will. Have you eaten? Lok makes a mean breakfast bowl. Go ahead and grab something and then we'll get down to business."

* * *

Shay understood the situation soon enough, and she led Hunk out of Yellow and into the tunnels. He had picked up most of it through the bond, but she repeated what she had learned anyway, if only out of nerves.

The people here were not as beaten down as Shay's own people. Perhaps that was because this Balmera was much closer to death, her song coming and going in waves. At times, Shay touched every mind within her tunnels, and could almost see through the others' eyes. At others, though, the song fell silent, and Shay had the sense that she had stepped out into empty space without her armor to protect her.

Whatever the cause, whether desperation or Elders more bold than the ones Shay knew, the Balmerans here were unafraid to fight back against their oppressors. Shay heard echoes of such clashes in the song, empty places where other voices should have been, strains of sorrow and of pride.

The latest uprising had been more ambitious than the ones that came before, and it had come closer to success as well. Close, and yet the Galra still emerged victorious. The instigators had been executed, including several Elders, and a guard force moved into the very heart of the Balmera, armed with explosives.

The message was clear: obey, or the Balmera died.

"We will have aid," Shay assured Hunk, her voice scarcely rising above a sigh. She pressed a hand to the wall, reaching out to the unfamiliar song to try to locate the guards patrolling these tunnels. The outermost levels had been abandoned, both Balmerans and guards now concentrated near the core. The song still confounded her, but the Balmerans here lent their aid, helping Shay to locate potential threats. "Once they are assured of the Balmera's safety, they will join the fight."

"Secure the heart chamber, spread the word, get back to Yellow to take out the defensive structures on the surface." Hunk nodded. "Easy enough."

Shay had to smile at that. She well remembered the day Hunk and the others had come to her Balmera, how desperate that fight had seemed. Now they had only two paladins and a single lion, with neither castle-ship nor Voltron to lend their strength.

Yet it was true that this did not feel so perilous as it once might have.

Even with the other Balmerans aiding her--or perhaps because she required that layer of interpretation--Shay could not see the tunnels in perfect clarity, but they met with only a few close calls on their way to the core, all easily avoided. Then they were there, crouched together in a small antechamber off the core, the light of the heart crystal dancing in the tunnel around them.

"I count ten sentries and eight Galra," Hunk murmured, glancing between his armor's scanners and the metal door blocking their way. "Allowing for a little error, we're up against two dozen enemies. They'll either have explosives rigged around the crystal or some big gun pointed at it. Maybe both."

"You look for explosives. You will know better than I how to disarm them. I will shield the crystal from any other threat."

Hunk nodded, his expression stoic. "Take the bayard, just in case."

It fell into Shay's hand in the next instant, humming as though to tell her it was ready for whatever they found waiting beyond the door, and she nodded to Hunk, who opened the casing of the  security pad beside the door, stripped two wires, and touched them together.

The door slid open, and the defensive force waiting within turned toward Shay, who raised both shields and charged, bowling over a man who was reaching for his gauntlet. Shay could not say whether he meant to destroy the crystal or to call for reinforcements, but she cared little either way. Dismissing her armor's shield, Shay reached down and ripped the gauntlet off the man's wrist, flinging it across the room. It landed beyond the last of the sentries and skidded to a stop against the far wall.

Shay was already moving once more, eyes roving the shadows of this chamber in search of threats. She spotted a number of discs attached to the crystal--bombs of the like she'd seen used elsewhere by the Empire--but no weapons other than the rifles carried by most of the guard force and the sword their leader carried.

Hunk skirted the edges of the battle and scooped up the gauntlet, ducking behind a stone outcropping as he got to work. With luck, he would be able to disarm the bombs quickly, and then he and Shay could focus on securing the chamber.

She just had to hold out until then and pray the crystal could do the same. She spread her stance and shouted defiantly as the lasers began to fly.

* * *

The briefing was over quickly--thank every god--and Keith led the way to their target, a detention center on the edge of the government district where several rebels were being held. The job was straight-forward: get in, get the rebels, get out. Arel had provided descriptions of their targets and blueprints of the facility, and Myta assured them all she would be on the line with them through the whole mission, just in case something came up.

Keith doubted anything would come up, but he was just glad it wouldn't be Arel on the line. He was apparently a reconnaissance expert for the rebellion, and he frequently ran ops with a team of grunts, the way he'd headed up the team that had captured Keith and the others in the cafe.

(He wasn't supposed to show his face, though, and Keith wished he'd been in the room when Mirek chewed him out for that.)

He wondered if that misstep was the reason Myta was in charge today, or if she was just the right combination of stubborn and charismatic to have gained some amount of respect despite being a soldier and therefore ostensibly inconsequential.

Another upside to having Myta run this mission was that she seemed content to let them handle things their own way. Maybe she just wanted to gauge their skill, or maybe as a fellow soldier she trusted them more than the rest. Either way, it meant she was a mostly silent presence on the comms as they approached the detention center, bypassed security on the door with one of Thace's clearance codes, and slipped inside. Thace broke off at once for the control room, Lance and Keith continuing on toward the cell block.

With as much intel as Arel had provided, the first half of the mission ran smoothly. There was a brief skirmish when Thace reached the control room, but he soon secured his position and reprogrammed the cameras, making a simple mission even easier.

"This place is huge," Lance muttered, holding his rifle like he was ready to take aim at the first guard to show their face. "They're really only keeping two people in here?"

"More like twenty," Myta said. "They bring in anyone who causes a scene, level charges of sedition and conspiracy and anything else they can spin a story about. Most of them will eventually be let out with a fine and a warning---they usually just want to deter protesters or break up anything they consider undesirable activity. But every now and then they'll find a way to make their charges stick."

Lance's steps slowed. "And then?"

"Depends on who gets the final say. The governor here in the 301's a fan of public executions, but some places you can get off with a couple weeks of work in one of the public works facilities."

Keith's stomach turned, and he knew with only a single look at Lance that they were thinking the same thing. Screw whatever Arel had said about there only being two targets. The _Nezai_ didn't tolerate injustice in any form, and anything that harmed citizens stood in direct opposition to their mission.

They were going to bust everyone out of here.

Thace only sighed as Keith and Lance reached the cell block. A pair of guards leaped to their feet, a holographic game board flickering out as a gun passed through it, but Keith was already moving, lopping off the barrel of the first guard’s rifle, then cracking him on the head with the hilt of his sword. The second guard received the same a moment later, dropping to the ground beside his companion.

Keith glanced down, confirming that both were still breathing, then nodded to Lance. The rebels hadn’t specifically requested they leave the guards alive, but Keith figured it went without saying, considering their stance on violence.

Well, that was fine. Keith could do nonlethal—he’d been striving for it whenever he could for the last six months.

“Disengaging locks,” Thace said. “This is going to trip the alarm, so consider yourselves on a time limit starting now.”

Keith winced as the alarms began to blare, but they'd been warned about this. The detention center had been the site of one too many jailbreaks already, and the governor had eventually ordered three redundant alarm systems installed. Pidge might have been able to get around it all—maybe—but Thace and Arel both said that digging around in the programming was just as likely to trigger an alarm as silence one, so it wasn’t worth the extra time.

As soon as the locks on the cell doors clunked open, Lance hauled the first one open. "All right, everybody, on your feet! Let's go!"

"Everybody?" Myta hissed. "That wasn't part of the plan."

"It wasn't part of your plan," Keith said, ushering people out of the cells. He checked faces against Arel’s description as they emerged, nodding to Lance when he found the two rebels they’d been sent for. "We don't pick and choose who we save."

"And what are we supposed to do with twenty wanted criminals?" Myta demanded. "The IP's going to be all over them by sundown!"

"We'll figure something out," Lance said. He spun a quick circle to ensure he hadn't missed anyone, then gestured toward the door. Keith took the lead, adjusting his grip on his sword as the guards poured into the corridor. He tried to keep his strikes nonlethal, but it was hard when things were this chaotic, lasers flashing past his head, prisoners crying out in fear or maybe pain. Keith kept pushing, not stopping to think, and more than one of the guards dropped with bloody wounds.

Well, if it came right down to it, he knew who he would choose, and it wasn’t the ones standing guard over innocent people who might be facing execution.

Six guards dropped under Keith’s blade. Eight. A dozen. He didn’t stop until he made it back to the atrium, where Thace had barricaded himself behind the front desk. Six more guards were waiting here, having upended several large storage lockers to give themselves cover.

“Stay down!” Keith roared at the prisoners, drawing his knife with his off hand.

He charged, leaping over the desk and landing atop the nearest guard. A laser singed his armor as it passed, and he rolled away, smashing his dagger’s pommel against the downed guard’s temple to keep him out of the fight. Thace was moving now, weaving among the guards on the other side of the room, and laserfire from the hallway Keith had come from said Lance had made his way to the front of the group.

The second guard went down almost as quickly as the first, first with a knife to his hand, then with a roundhouse kick to lay him flat.

"Keith!"

Lance's voice rang out, shrill even through the blaring of the alarm, and Keith spun toward the place he’d last seen his final opponent. They weren’t there. Keith’s heart hammered against his ribs, but before he could find the missing guard, Lance was there, shoving him out of the way as a laser streaked toward him. Lance cried out in pain, staggering, and Keith rounded on the gunman, who had taken shelter against the desk, where Lance wouldn’t have had a clear shot.

Keith ripped the helmet off one of the fallen guards and hurled it at the guard as he took aim again at Lance. The helmet smacked against the barrel of the gun, throwing it off so his next shot went wide.

Keith leaped on him before he could take aim again, driving his knife straight through his armor and into his chest. The guard’s eyes went wide, his hands pawing at the wound, but Keith didn’t linger. He kicked the gun away, turned one quick circle to ensure no other enemies were still standing, and sprinted back to Lance, who had sat down with his back against one of the storage lockers, his hand pressed to his side.

"Just grazed me," he said before Keith could ask. His voice was shaky, but he pulled his hand aside to show that the shot hadn't even broken his armor, though the material was scorched and melted. "Just--give me a sec and I'll be good to go. Get everyone else out."

Keith lifted his head, catching Thace's eye. "Get them out! Lance and I are right behind you."

Lance muttered a curse and punched Keith's arm. “That’s not what I said, samurai.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Keith said. “Come on. It’s not safe.” Lance scowled, but he let Keith pull him upright, taking on most of his weight as he helped him toward the door.

* * *

Hunk gave a cheer as as he found the disarm switch on the gauntlet Shay had stolen from the officer. He poked his head up over the lump of stone he'd taken cover behind, watching the indicator lights on the bombs flicker out. A direct hit from a laser could still detonate them, but the worst of the danger was over with now.

"Shay!" Hunk called, activating his shield and leaping over the stone. She glanced his way, nodding once, and released her bayard. Hunk summoned it at once, but he hesitated for a moment before he activated it. His usual gun would be no good here--a wide spread of lasers, hitting the Balmera as often as the enemy? Maybe even hitting the crystals or--god forbid--the bombs?

No thanks. Hunk pivoted, ducking behind his shield as he tried to recall how it had felt the first time he made his bayard take on another form. So far everything he'd managed had been a tool, not a new weapon, but the principle should be the same, right? He just had to hold an image in his head of what he needed his bayard to do.

And right now what he needed was control.

He activated his bayard, and it became a handgun, not unlike the ones he'd trained with at the Garrison. Marksmanship had never been his best subject; he definitely couldn't compare to Lance; but he'd gotten better since becoming a paladin. (He hoped he'd gotten better.)

There was no time for doubt, though, and Ativan was good for nothing if not quieting his anxiety, so Hunk squared his stance, took aim, and opened fire on the guards, who were still trying to figure out whether Hunk or Shay was the bigger threat. Hunk took two out before they'd gathered themselves, and he only missed twice.

The officer shouted in alarm, waving the sentries forward, and Shay pounced on the opening, crushing one sentry against the far wall as she charged, then ducking down, one hand holding her shield, the other pressed against the wall. The Balmera rumbled as Hunk took down another guard, and then the floor rose up, two slabs of stone crushing the remaining sentries between them. Hunk pressed forward, still firing as he inched around the guard force, lining them up so neither of them were shooting directly toward the crystal.

Shay called on the Balmera again, and the ground quivered beneath the Galra, who balked, three of them breaking formation at once to run for the door. The rest held out a moment longer, but only until Hunk got a shot in on the officer, who dropped like a lead weight.

The chamber was empty within seconds, and Hunk gave a shaky laugh as he crossed to the doors, checking outside for reinforcements.

"All clear!" he called to Shay, who relayed the message through the Balmera. "They should send someone down here to guard this chamber in case the Galra try to retake it."

"Already on their way," Shay said. "The Balmera will guard herself until they arrive. _Exunt_. We must take to the skies."

Hunk nodded, following her back the way they'd come. Tunnels that had been still and silent just a few moments ago were now bursting with activity--with Galra fleeing and firing on Balmerans, with Balmerans wresting weapons away from guards and rushing about, hands trailing on the stone walls. They nodded to Hunk and Shay as they passed, humming songs Hunk could only guess the meaning of, but the hard expressions and quick steps said they knew what they were about.

He ran faster, determined to put an end to this as quickly as possible. If they could destroy enough of the surface structures, they might be able to draw the forces out of the tunnels, or even force a retreat. He doubted the Galra wanted to be stuck on this planet with an angry populace, a couple Voltron paladins, and rapidly dwindling resources.

Yellow roared a greeting as they emerged from the tunnels, and they took off in a single bound. Shay took great care with each shot, and Hunk did everything he could to keep them steady, diverting power from the cloak now to the stabilizers. Yellow wasn't exactly the most delicate of the lions, but you wouldn't have known it to see her flying now. They demolished a shield tower, then a weapons array, then dive-bombed a hangar, trapping the fighters within.

Soon alarms began to blare, and Hunk held his breath, praying the Galra wouldn't dig in their heels.

But no--a few moments later, a ship rose from a hangar halfway around the Balmera. Shay moved to intercept, but though the ship fired on them, it seemed more concerned with getting away.

Shay let them go. Yes, word would get back to Zarkon, but it likely would have anyway, and cutting off all means of escape would only make the remaining Galra fight back more as victory was their only chance of survival. Besides, Zarkon wasn't exactly known for his mercy toward soldiers who retreated from battle. The ones who left might just try to disappear.

Another ship rose from the surface of the Balmera, and then another. Yellow and her paladins made their steady way around the Balmera, taking out structures where they could. When at last the tide of ships slowed, they landed again, plunging back into the tunnels to clear out whoever remained.

* * *

It was nearly a full day before Sam saw Rolo again. He kept leaving his body, venturing out to the destroyed lab, to the other cells, to whatever he could reach of the facility, hoping against hope that he might find something. When he returned to his body after one of these trips, he found that Rax had awoken. He'd retreated a few feet, seemingly embarrassed by his earlier display of emotion, and Sam forcibly redirected his mind away from concerns about Rolo to Rax's less mortal but no less sympathetic trials.

"Sleep well?" Sam asked, offering a sad smile and giving Rax some space.

Rax lifted his head, eyeing Sam like he expected mockery or derision of some kind. "I can scarcely sleep at all in this place. I suppose you can consider it well that I did not dream."

Sam laughed despite himself, wishing he could tell Rax how many times he'd slept on the border between the physical and the surreal precisely to avoid his dreams. "Take what you can get, son. Lord knows you can't count on anything more in this place."

Rax had nothing to say to that, but there was little to do in the cell, and by the time Sam returned from his next foray into the lab, he found Rax asleep against the wall beside him--not leaning on Sam, not quite, but teetering on an edge.

Sam pulled him closer, but when he tried once more to step outside of his body, he ran up against a wall. He was exhausted, but it was such a norm for him that he hadn't noticed until it smacked him in the face. He resisted for a moment, then gave into his body's demands and settled back into himself, dozing off with his cheek leaning on the top of Rax's head.

The next time he woke, it was to the sound of the door flying open to slam against the inner wall of the cell. A guard stepped in, leveling a gun at Sam and Rax, who had gathered his feet beneath him as though ready to flee—though of course there was nowhere to go.

The first guard stepped aside, and a second entered, dragging Rolo by the arm. Rolo staggered, crying out, and the guard shoved him forward.

"Rest up, half-breed," the gaurd said. "Gorvek wants you ready for training by the end of the cycle."

"Training?" Sam breathed. He didn't intend for the guard to hear, but he did, and he grinned.

"Don't worry. You'll get your chance soon enough. Before the half-breed, I'll wager."

That was less than comforting, but the guards didn't linger in the cell--they rarely did--and Sam was more worried about Rolo, who had fallen against the side wall. His face was pinched, his breath coming in short gasps, and when he finally moved it was only to turn around and lower himself to the ground, his bad leg stretched out in front of him.

His bad leg, which filled out his prison uniform more than it ever had since Sam had known him.

Sam's heart dropped, and he gave Rax's arm a squeeze before crossing to where Rolo sat and crouching beside him. "What happened?" he asked in a low voice. "Are you okay?"

Rolo's laugh was feeble, and he pressed his hand to his eyes, trembling all over. "Hurts," he said. "Sorry, just--give me a second."

Sam sat beside him, holding back an interrogation. His eyes kept going back to Rolo's leg, and his stomach churned. He knew these people well enough to know that no gift came without a price. "Take your time, son," he said. "I'm not going anywhere. Just breathe with me."

Rolo followed Sam's direction, breathing through his teeth for several long moments. Sam glanced up to see that Rax was watching them, his eyes wide and his hands making fists in the fabric of his prison uniform. Sam met his eyes, but didn't say anything. Now wasn't the time to speak of the festering tensions between Rax and Rolo. Rax never did well with confrontation, and Rolo had more urgent problems.

Slowly, Rolo's breathing steadied. It remained unnervingly shallow, but the heaving gasps were gone, and Sam managed to coax Rolo into leaning against him at an angle where Sam could rub his back. It was familiar, almost painfully so, and it brought to mind late nights back on Earth, years ago now, when one virus or another laid Matt low for days at a time. It had hit each fall, like clockwork, and each time Sam sat up with him on the worst nights, getting new blankets when the chills set in, fetching water and movies to keep Matt distracted from his aches.

There were no movies here, of course. No warm blankets or promises of chicken noodle soup as soon as Karen was up and able to take over for Sam in Matt's room. But Sam would still do what he could.

"What do you need from me?" he asked Rolo.

At first, Rolo didn't answer. Maybe he was thinking about how none of them could offer any real comfort as long as they were in this place, or maybe he was just having a hard time getting his thoughts in line. Whatever they'd done to him while he was gone had obviously left him in a lot of pain.

"We should... We're probably going to need to clean this." Rolo reached hand down and pressed it to his leg, about where his limb ended. When he'd first come here, they'd grafted a rudimentary prosthetic to it--a little more flexible than a peg leg, but no more sturdy. Sam had done his best to stave off infection, but the contact point still hurt Rolo more often than not, and Sam suspected the druids themselves deserved more credit for the lack of infection than anything Sam had done.

With a few more deep breaths, Rolo shifted, pulling his leg closer. Just watching the way the ankle moved, Sam knew they'd given Rolo a considerable upgrade, and he couldn't help dreading the day he found out why they'd bothered. Training, the guard had called it. Training for what?

Sam let Rolo peel back his pant leg, rolling the fabric up to above his knee so Sam could see the new scar tissue, a faint, shiny periwinkle against the darker scars he'd had before. The prosthetic was even more advanced than Sam had been anticipating. To call it a prosthetic was to undersell the work that had gone into the leg. Cybernetic would have been a better word. When it moved he heard the faint whir of gears, and the outer layer was made of interlocking metal plates, so small at the ankle that they slid over each other almost like real skin as the joint flexed.

"Guess they want me on my feet again," Rolo said, screwing his eyes shut. His hands shook as he squeezed the limb above the cybernetic augmentation, fingers pale enough to provide a stark contrast to the flushed, feverish tone of the skin above his knee. "I'd say this is our chance for escape, except I think I might actually be slower right now than I was on the old piece of junk."

Sam smiled sadly, taking Rolo's hand and squeezing. "I think we've got a little water left. I'll see what I can do. Why don't you lie down?"

Rolo didn't protest, and Sam got to work, trying not to be sick as he cleaned dried blood off Rolo's leg. He imagined Rolo lying in the operating theater, all alone. If he'd been lucky, they'd drugged him enough that he didn't feel the pain, even if he'd still watched them work from outside his body. But Sam wasn't so optimistic as to expect such mercy from their captors. More likely, they'd just strapped him down and set to work with his screams ringing in their ears.

They fell into silence as Sam worked, Rolo occaionally hissing in pain, Rax slowly inching forward until he crouched beside Sam, his face deeply lined.

"I am sorry."

Rolo lifted his head, staring at Rax like he was trying to figure out whether he'd started hearing things. "What?"

Rax tore his eyes off of Rolo's cybernetic leg and met Rolo's eyes. Sam held his breath, his hands stilling as he watched the exchange. Something in Rax had shifted. It wasn't that he was any less guarded, any less scarred by the horrors of his past, which he still refused to talk about in any detail.

But now when he looked at Rolo, he saw a fellow victim.

"Apologies," Rax murmured, dropping his gaze. "I have been unfair to you. I see that now."

Rolo's lips quirked into a smile, and he let his head fall back to the ratty blanket he was using as a pillow. "I get it," he said. "Life out there is tough, and it's hard to make yourself trust a stranger even if they don't look like one of the bad guys. It sucks, but you're not the first to treat me like shit."

Rax flinched and Rolo, seeming to notice his own tone, wrinkled his nose.

"Sorry. I don't mean to be bitter. I don't hold it against you, kid, honest. We've all got our own ghosts."

Rax stared at the ground for a long moment, his brow furrowed, before finally closing the last few inches between himself, Sam, and Rolo. "I would aid you," he said through gritted teeth. "If you would allow me to do so."

"Aid..." Rolo cocked his head to the side, glancing from Rax to Sam. "Uh, sure. How are you planning on doing that?"

Rax turned his hands palms-up on his knees and stared at them. "My grandmother is a healer. She taught my sister the art, as well as several other of our circle. I never had Shay's talent for healing, but I learned a little. Enough to care for the younglings when they were sick or injured. Enough to help keep our home alive while the Galra ruled us." He lifted his chin, looking to Sam as though for approval. "The Quintessence in this place is... wrong. It does not respond to me as it should, and it clings to us all like poison. But I may yet be able to work some good. I may at least be able to ease his pain."

Sam looked to Rolo, trying to gauge his reaction. He seemed wary--not of Rax, but perhaps afraid to get his hopes up. A sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead, and he was still too pale for Sam's liking, so when he nodded, Sam breathed a sigh of relief.

"All right, son," he said, resting his hand on Rax's shoulder. "Thank you."

They shifted, Rax taking Sam's place by Rolo's knee and Sam retreating far enough to take Rolo's head in his lap. Rax hesitated a moment, then laid his hands on Rolo's leg, one on either side of his thigh just above the knee. He closed his eyes, breathed in, and a faint blue glow emanated from his hands, sinking into Rolo's leg.

Rolo drew in a sharp breath, tensing, then went suddenly boneless, his breath leaving him in a rush.

"Damn," he whispered. "Talk about painkillers."

Rax's shoulders hiked up, and he pretended not to have noticed Rolo's words, choosing instead to focus on his work. He continued for a few minutes, and Sam could see no sign of whether or not it was working--except for the fact that Rolo was still relaxed, his breaths coming deep and even. He might have been asleep for all Sam knew.

Eventually, though, Rax's hands lost their glow and he sat back on his heels. "That is about the limit of my skill," he said. "If I do the same once a day, it should speed your recovery, but I cannot say by how much."

"Don't sell yourself short, man," Rolo said, cracking his eyes open. "That was--" He shook his head, pulling himself upright and prodding at his leg. He still winced when he touched the fresh scar tissue, but it looked a little less inflamed than before. Rolo smiled. "That was amazing. Thank you."

Rax huffed, retreating back against the wall in an instant. "You need not thank me," he grumbled, refusing to meet Rolo or Sam's eyes. "If you had died of infection, they would have just taken it out on us."

Rolo chuckled. He knew as well as Sam did that that was probably true--but it hadn't been self-preservation that prompted Rax to act. Somewhere underneath that jaded exterior, he was a caretaker at heart. He couldn't have sat back and watched Rolo suffer any more than Sam could have.

But Sam left him his pride and helped Rolo settle in to rest. It had been a long day for all of them, Rolo most of all. With luck, he would be able to rest now. Sam suspected he'd need his strength when the druids finally began his "training."

* * *

The battle did not last long after Shay and Hunk returned to the tunnels. Most of the Galra had withdrawn on the ships, and what few remained relied on the sentries to protect them. One of the Balmerans found their way to the control beacon--Shay heard the rallying cry in the song as she fought alongside several others of her people. Balmerans had rushed to aid the one at the control beacon, and they'd destroyed it utterly, rendering the sentries harmless.

After that, the remaining Galra had surrendered without a fight.

They were being held now in one of the outer chambers, which the Balmera had sealed shut to prevent escape. The Elders had gathered to decide what to do with them, among other things. First, though, they seemed intrigued by Shay's presence here, and by the song she sang, which was foreign to them, yet undeniably similar to their Balmera's song.

"I am Elder Shay," she said, faltering for a moment as she realized she had no words to tell these people where she had come from. "My Balmera resides currently in the Lautrovian Sector. I come here both as a Balmeran and as a paladin of Voltron, together with my fellow paladin, Hunk Kahale, my promised heart-mate."

She gestured to Hunk, who smiled and gave a little wave, blushing as the song turned speculative.

"Paladins..." one of the Elders said. Kai, he'd said his name was. "I have heard only whispers of the paladins. They were before our Balmera's time."

Shay's pulse quickened. "Then you remember your history?"

Another Elder, Elder Lem blinked. "Of course. We have kept our songs for generations. It was the one thing we did not let the Galra take from us."

Shay smiled, her song dipping into sadness that only further confused the other Elders. "Much of our history was lost to us. The Galra killed those who once kept our songs, or so I have heard. We remember very little of what we once knew. In truth, that is part of our reason for coming here: not only to free other Balmera from Zarkon's control, but to recover that which we have lost."

Elder Els nodded emphatically. "A noble aim, and one which I am sure many of my circle would be glad to lend their aid."

"Mine as well," said Lem. "For all we take pride in the histories we have kept, we are under no illusions that we have saved everything. Zarkon has destroyed much, and our Balmera has been under the Galra's rule for many generations. In seeking out others of our people, perhaps we can begin to rebuild."

"And you'll definitely all stand a better chance against Zarkon if you're together," Hunk said. "Shay was telling me how groups of Balmera used to Migrate together so they could defend their young."

Kai's song turned sad. "A blessed vision, truly, but our Balmera is in poor shape. She would have difficulty leaving this place, far less partaking in a Migration."

"We have allies who may be able to help," Shay said. "Alteans. They once had a pact with our people--to trade their Quintessence for crystals, willingly given. We need no crystals now, but I'm sure our companions would gladly offer their Quintessence to begin to heal your Balmera."

Awe and gratitude sang in the walls of the Balmera, and Lem stepped forward, extending her hand for Shay to take. "Bless you, Elder Shay. We would be glad of the aid. Call your friends, and let us away, before the Galra return. We will speak then further of this conference of historians."

* * *

"You shouldn't have jumped in front of me like that. That was reckless."

Lance scoffed. "Says the _Red_."

Keith leaned back, pausing in his efforts to clean and bandage Lance's burn so he could scowl at him instead. "I don't--"

"Earth," Lance said, the tiniest smirk saying he'd hoped Keith would argue. "You stabbed my hand and dumped me out an airlock so you could get captured by Haggar's ass-kisser? I still have a scar from that!"

"You do not have a scar." Keith ducked his head, dabbing a little more healing cream on the burn, then wiping his hands on a towel and reaching for the adhesive patch. "But--fine. But you were the one who yelled at me for that stunt, so don't you think it makes you a little bit of a hypocrite to go and do the same thing yourself?"

Lance wrinkled his nose, patting at the bandage once Keith pulled his hand away. He winced at the motion, but most of the pain seemed to have faded by now. He'd needed Keith to help him out of the detention center, but after a bit of rest and a quick flight home, he'd been able to move under his own power, and only a little slower than usual.

"Maybe I am a hypocrite," Lance said. "But I'm not going to apologize. That shot could have killed you. I barely got singed. You promised you wouldn't die on me. Not my fault if you need a little help to keep that promise."

Keith sighed, but he knew this wasn't a fight he was going to win. So he just sat back, smiling as Lance pulled on a shirt, then settled back into the nest of pillows Keith had made on his bed. Thace had stayed with Myta to give report to the rebellion and to figure out what to do with everyone they'd freed.

Some small corner of Keith's mind felt bad for leaving that to Thace, but the rest of him was too busy reminding himself that Lance was okay. He put the med kit away in the kitchen cupboard, then returned and climbed into bed beside Lance, hugging his knees to his chest. He wanted to climb on top of Lance, to nuzzle into his neck and breathe in his scent.

He felt childish just imagining it. Affection like that wasn't the sort of thing you indulged in when you were a soldier. He thought his mother might have held him when he was young, before Thace came to say she'd been killed. He occasionally saw couples stealing touches in the corridors.

He saw plenty of reenactments in holodramas.

But he couldn't tell how much of these impulses was an act--an effort to play the loving boyfriend Lance deserved--and how much came from the simple fact that Lance was someone safe and his touch, more and more, was something Keith craved.

Well, Lance was injured anyway, so that solved Keith's dilemma quite neatly. It was nice just to sit with him regardless. They put on one of Lance's movies, and Keith watched it silently, content in Lance's presence. Lance was asleep within half an hour, after which point Keith rapidly lost interest in the movie, choosing instead to watch the rise and fall of Lance's chest. Maybe it was the close call at the detention center, but Keith couldn't help a surge of protectiveness as he heard footsteps pass in the hall outside the apartment. He checked the knife at his side, then settled in to watch.

He was still awake and alert two hours later when Thace finally returned, the beeps as he input their door code winding Keith's nerves so tight he had his knife halfway out of its sheathe by the time Thace called a greeting.

Feeling foolish, Keith put his knife away, then went out to the kitchen so he could talk to Thace without bothering Lance.

"So?" Keith asked. "How'd it go?"

"They're a bit miffed that we deviated from the plan," Thace said, pulling a mug out of the cupboard and leaning against the counter near the stove, where he had a kettle heating. "But I don't think anyone's actually mad. Arel, perhaps. That boy seems to be mad about everything, though, so I wouldn't hold my breath for his approval."

Keith snorted. After a moment's hesitation, he hopped up onto the counter across from Thace. Thace grabbed a second mug, tipping it toward Keith in a silent question. Glancing at the box sitting by Thace's mug--the same cheap tea that was all you could buy on the homeworld--Keith wrinkled his nose, but he nodded anyway. His body was dragging, but his thoughts were too tangled to hope for sleep. Maybe the tea would clear some of the fog from his head.

Silence filled the kitchen for some time as the water came to the edge of a boil and Thace filled both mugs. It was only after he'd passed Keith his that he spoke up.

"I assume from the lack of panic in the apartment that Lance is doing well."

Keith breathed in the steam coming off his mug and grunted. "He's asleep. I got his burn patched up, so he should be fine in a few hours."

"Ah, the miracles of modern medicine." Thace's humor was a dry one, and not something Keith easily picked up on, but it seemed more acerbic than usual today, and Keith squinted at him, trying to figure out what was bothering him. Thace, of course, noticed, and met Keith's eyes steadily. "And how are you doing?"

Keith frowned. "Fine? I didn't get hit."

"No..." Thace glanced at the clock, pulled his tea bag out of the mug, and tossed it into the waste chute. "But you did seem... alarmed by Lance getting hurt."

Keith froze, his tea bag dripping on the kitchen floor. Alarmed. That was a nice way to put it. Charging into danger, forgetting all about the prisoners they were supposed to be rescuing, stabbing a man in the chest just because he'd hurt Lance— _barely_ hurt him, at that. Yeah, okay. Keith was _alarmed_.

"How bad did I fuck us over with the rebellion?" Keith asked, tossing his tea bag into the sink rather than cross to the waste chute by Thace. He stared into his mug, then took a swallow, ignoring the way the tea singed his tongue.

"That's... not what I meant."

Keith laughed bitterly, but lifted his head, searching Thace's concerned frown for signs that he was covering up something more. "You don't need to protect me, okay? I get it. They think we're monsters because we went through with the Proof, and just when you and Lance managed to convince them we maybe weren't so bad after all, here I come, flying into a rage and impaling someone just because he pissed me off."

"You were protecting a teammate." Thace wrapped his hands around his mug. "I don't think anyone blames you for that."

"But they're more than happy to blame me for everything else I've done in my life."

With a sigh, Thace closed his eyes and fell silent for a long moment. Keith's gut churned with guilt and shame--for snapping in the detention center, for this little outburst here. Maybe Arel was right. Maybe after you'd grown up in the Empire, swallowing their lies and letting them shape you into the perfect solider, there was no breaking free. Keith was who he was.

It wasn’t Arel’s fault that Keith was only now beginning to realize he didn’t like the man he’d become.

"Zarkon has had a long time to figure out how to shape people into the tools he needs." Thace kept his eyes on the floor, his mug tucked in close to his chest, though he still hadn't taken a sip. "He doesn't like people talking about it, but if you look deep enough in the records, you can trace it back. The Empire wasn't always as militaristic as it is now. Even when Zarkon started to push his borders and needed more soldiers, he didn't always get it right. Military duty was compulsory for a while, until Zarkon realized too many well-intentioned people were gaining authority in his army."

Keith's ears laid back, his mouth running dry. "Thanks for the history lesson. What's your point?"

"The Proof was a very deliberate decision on Zarkon's part," Thace said. "One he arrived at after thousands of years of trial and error. Its purpose is twofold. First, it weeds out anyone who cannot do what Zarkon requires of his officers. Most of those people wouldn't have lasted long enough to gain much influence, anyway, but it's a safeguard.

"Secondly, and more importantly, it tricks you into thinking you had a choice. You didn't, not really. Zarkon made sure of that. But you _think_ you did. It feels like you did, because no one put a gun to your head and forced you to step into that Arena. The Proof is a battle for survival, carefully framed as the slaughter of an innocent prisoner. And for people like us--people who understand that it's sometimes necessary to kill, but who have enough integrity to see evil for what it is--for those people, the Proof is unconscionable. And that's where the true genius of the Proof lies. Because people will do anything to soothe a tormented conscience, even convince themselves that what they did was right after all. That the _Empire_ is right, because Zarkon says the Proof is noble, and if you believe him, then you don't have to tear yourself apart over it."

Keith's heart contracted, and he hunched forward, leaning his elbows on his knees. "But _why_?"

“Because people like us are strong enough to gain a following among his ranks, but we deviate enough from Zarkon’s mantra that we pose a threat to the status quo. Put the two together, and you might very well tear his army apart from within. It's happened before, though Zarkon has so far always managed to put out the flames before they spread far."

Keith groaned, his heart pounding in his throat. "Okay, but none of that really matters, does it? Zarkon and his army didn't kill that prisoner. _I_ did. I'm the one who cut him down. That's on me."

Thace was silent for a moment, and then the clink of his mug on the countertop startled Keith into looking up. Thace crossed to where he sat and took him by the shoulders.

"It hurts," Thace said. "I know it does. I've had to come to terms with it, too. I can't give you the answers; that's ultimately something you have to work out for yourself. But Keith..." He searched Keith's face, his brows pinching. "At least believe me when I say that the Proof does not define you."

Keith looked away. "I guess..."

Thace sagged, his grip on Keith's shoulders tightening. "I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, but none hurts more than the day I chose the mission over you."

Keith sucked in a breath, clutching his mug so tight his knuckles ached. "What?"

"The day Keena fled, she ordered me not to break cover. We were too close to too many secrets the Accords desperately needed to know." He shook his head. "And I listened to her. I let myself believe that you would be okay. If I survived my Proof, you would too. That's what I told myself. I was a fool."

Emotion gathered in Keith's throat, making it difficult to speak, and he wet his lips. "I did survive, though. And your work saved lives. You made the right choice."

"No, Keith. Someone else could have done the job. If I had it all to do again, I would have taken you the day Keena faked her death, and I would have run. You shouldn't have had to grow up in that place. And I'm sorry for that. I can't fix the past, but I swear to you--I will never choose the mission over you again."

Thace smiled, and while Keith was still scrambling for an answer, still trying to wrap his head around Thace's words, Thace returned to the other side of the kitchen, downed his tea in a single drink, and grabbed his mask off the counter.

"Did you hide the speeder in the usual place?"

"Uh, y-yeah."

Thace nodded. "We've been using it too long. I'm going to trade it in for something new. Get some rest while I'm gone. Myta mentioned that there might be another job coming soon.

He was gone without another word, leaving Keith alone on the kitchen counter, a mug of cold tea in his hands and his head stuffed full of conflicting thoughts. _I'm sorry,_ Thace had said. No one had ever apologized for Keith's childhood before. No one who had had a hand in it, at any rate.

He didn't know how to feel about that, so he scrubbed at the tears gathering in the corners of his eyes, dumped his tea down the sink, and went back into Lance's room to try to get some sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summary of scene mentioned in the chapter warnings: The guards bring Rolo back to the cell, and Sam discovers that they've surgically attached a new cybernetic leg. Rax takes pity on Rolo and draws on what he remembers of Shay's lessons with their grandmother to try to heal Rolo's leg and ease his pain.


	25. Oriande

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Keith and Lance have made contact with the homeworld rebellion, but Keith's old classmate Arel doesn't trust them in the least. In between making plans for their Unity, Hunk and Shay freed a second Balmera. Meri has made contact with Dez and Ulaz, who thinks he can infiltrate Vindication, one of Haggar's latest pet projects--though Meri may need to get dangerously close to Haggar to make it happen.
> 
> When Zarkon attacked the summit, Shiro and Black were hit hard with bad memories, and they locked up for the tail end of the battle. The encounter left them both shaken, and while Shiro more or less found his footing in the days that followed, he has yet to talk to Black about what happened.
> 
> Team Hogwarts took a detour through the astral plane, where they all got separated, and Matt had a chat with Keith about something Keith had seen while caught up in Red's panic attack: a memory that seems to indicate that Allura's mother Lealle sided with Zarkon ten thousand years ago. Afterwards, Team Hogwarts reunited and finally found their way to Oriande, where they were greeted by two Alteans in white robes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay on this chapter, folks! If you follow me on Tumblr or are in the discord, you may have already seen that the last couple of weeks have been rough for me. Thank you all so much for your support and kind messages; it really means the world to me <3
> 
> I'm getting back on track, but just to give myself time to rebuild my buffer and finish a couple side projects, I'm going to update every other week for the month of June. When we hit July I'll see where I'm at and hopefully go back to regular weekly chapters.
> 
> Trigger warnings: Discussion of past abuse and trauma in a general sense in Shiro's second scene, but none of it is particularly intense.

"Okay, sorry to interrupt, but I have no clue what we're even doing here."

Riala, one of the two Alteans who had greeted Matt and his friends upon their arrival in Oriande, paused in the middle of a long-winded explanation of the "expectations" for their "pilgrimage." So far Matt had gathered that all visitors to Oriande had a guide (no word on whether Riala or her companion Rhoal were going to _be_ that guide), they all had to wear shapeless white ponchos over their clothes (complete with hood and gloves to hide every inch of them except their faces), no one was allowed to stay over night (which only made the long orientation that much more irritating), and they had to be sure not to seek the "forbidden knowledge" (whatever the quiznak that was.)

"I... sorry." Riala glanced at Rhoal, blinking. Matt had been staring at her intricate _glaes_ for the last ten minutes, trying to trace them, and they almost distracted him again now as the light caught them. They shone in a way none of the other _glaes_ Matt had seen did, almost as though the pigmented skin had a waxy coating. "Are you not here on pilgrimage?"

"I don't think so?" Val said, glancing at Allura. "Unless--sorry, you did say this was a sacred site. Did I miss something?"

Allura shook her head. "Forgive us. When we set out in search of Oriande, we didn't exactly know what to expect. I'm not sure what sort of pilgrimage you're used to, but we've more or less arrived here by accident."

Rhoal cocked eir head to the side. "But... you came looking for the wisdom of the sages, didn't you?"

"Well, yes, I suppose. But to be honest, I was expecting to find this place in ruins."

Riala's lips quirked into a smile. "Yes. That's quite a common misconception among our guests. But you see, Oriande exists a bit outside of time. You're from...." She leaned forward in her seat, a sheen of blue light flickering deep inside her eyes. "Ah. Yes. That's understandable, then. Ten thousand years may have passed since our last contact with the Altean people from your perspective, but from ours?" She chuckled. "Why that's no time at all to Oriande! And I do mean that literally."

Matt rubbed his face, a headache gathering behind his eyes. They had yet to leave the room in which they had first appeared--a small sitting room with a pair of bookshelves flanking the door, a fancy tapestry on one wall, and an oddly minimalist set of chairs.

Riala's words seemed to have left Allura speechless, and Rhoal smiled, leaning forward to take her hand. "Don't worry about it, your Highness. Many of our pilgrims don't know what's waiting for them here in Oriande. That's why we provide guides for you during your stay."

"Right..." Val drummed her hands on her knees, glancing around the room. "So is there something we were supposed to do to prepare? Or something we have to do while we're here?"

"Only what we've already laid out for you," Riala said. "Wear the robes, listen to your guide, and do not seek forbidden knowledge."

Matt glanced at Val, but it was Edi who spoke, her nose wrinkled in frustration. "And what exactly qualifies as forbidden?"

Rhoal tipped eir head to one side, then the other. "We have people, sometimes, who try to... take advantage of Oriande's unique position in the universe. They hear that they have stepped out of time and they think that means they can take a sneak peak at their own future, or..." Ey trailed off, waving a hand vaguely. "You know. They go looking for hints of what's coming so they can stack the deck."

"Which is... bad, I'm guessing," Matt said.

"It is futile." Riala sat up straight, folding her hands in her lap. "The universe itself guards against incursions into the web of fate, and we have set up certain safeguards to help it along. We request your voluntary cooperation in this matter in order to spare you any unnecessary distress, but we will remove you from the situation if we must."

Matt held up his hands. "Don't go asking questions. Got it."

" _Questions_ are not the issue here," Riala said. "Oriande exists to collect and disseminate knowledge, and you are free to ask questions of your guide--and of course as pilgrims you each are entitled to a single Question of the sages before you leave." Her emphasis suggested that this last Question was more than a way to sate curiosity, which probably meant the sages were a big deal here. Matt figured Allura could probably explain that part, though, or their guide could, and he was itching to get out of this room and start exploring Oriande.

He leaned forward, hands curling over his kneecaps, and glanced around the room. "Okay. Should we get going, then? Where are these robes we're supposed to wear?"

"Right here." Rhaol gestured to a rack along one wall, then tapped a silver band on eir wrist, and a holographic display popped up, showing the time. "But you'll want to be measured first. The tailor should be here right about... now."

Ey pointed to the door just as a knock sounded, then beamed at Matt and his friends while Riala called out for the visitor to enter. A younger Altean shuffled in, _glaes_ much closer to the simple markings Matt was used to. He wore a white robe like Riala and Rhoal's, though without the intricate gold embroidery. Instead he had only a pale blue cloth belt around his waist and a pair of red earrings.

The newcomer pulled out a small handheld device. "I'll only be a moment," he said, waving the device in the air. "Just need to take your measurements." When no one protested, he gestured for them all to stand and set to scanning them, a hologram of a golden cord appearing in the air and tracing out a series of measurements. Shoulders, chest, hips, arms, height--possibly more, but it was over too fast for Matt to be sure. The tailor nodded, tucked the device away, and gestured to the rack of robes that was already in the room.

"You're all set. Enjoy your stay on Oriande."

Val plucked at the first robe. "What, just like that?"

"Tybation will get your measurements to the master tailor," Riala said. "They'll make any adjustments that need to be made and have it ready by the scheduled time."

"Even though that time has already passed," Val said.

Rhaol chuckled. "Such a linear view of time. It never ceases to amuse me."

Riala closed her eyes, then stood and gave Rhaol a pointed look. "We'll leave you to it. Your guide for this pilgrimage will be Aneta. You'll find her just outside when you've finished dressing. May the wisdom of the sages guide you."

* * *

Shiro stood at the door to the Black Lion's hangar, his steps slowing to a crawl. It had been three days since Zarkon had attacked the summit, and this was the first time Shiro had ventured into Black's hangar. He told himself that it was all in an effort to give Black the time and space she needed to heal, but he couldn't lie to himself. He'd needed the space, too. He'd needed time to find his center before he came here, because he knew that the conversation he needed to have would involve revisiting his own trauma.

He was ready now, though. He thought. He just hoped Black was ready for this, too.

"Hey." He took a single step forward, coming far enough inside the hangar that the door slid shut behind him. The first set of lights flickered on in response to the motion, but most of the hangar remained dim, lit only by the faint blue emergency lighting and the glow of Black's eyes. "Is this okay?"

He didn't bother elaborating; she was still his lion, and he was still her paladin, and they understood each other as well as ever. Shiro wasn't at all surprised when Black rumbled her assent--but even so, he'd needed to hear her say it.

She lowered her head to meet him halfway across the hangar, and Shiro entered her cockpit, his throat closing as memories swarmed in, darkening the air around him. Zarkon's ghost lingered in the spaces between Shiro and Black--and Allura, wherever she was. Shiro had tried to contact her last night, after letting Akira distract him for two days with games and movies and a friendly spar that soon devolved into pure, juvenile roughhousing. Allura hadn't answered, and Coran's shiftiness when Shiro approached him about it suggested this wasn't a one-time occurrence.

 _ **She is well,**_ Black assured him, reaching out with a tentative touch, like a kitten cautiously headbutting its owner's hand. She was just as uncertain about his as him, then. The realization brought a melancholy smile to Shiro's lips, and he pressed his hand to the wall beside him, lingering there at the top of the ramp for a moment before crossing the cockpit and taking his seat behind the controls.

"I know Allura can take care of herself," he said, scratching at his cheek, where a day's worth of stubble had grown. He'd kept himself up late last night agonizing over the conversation he needed to have with Black, and after hitting snooze three times this morning, he'd finally just rolled out of bed and dragged himself down here in the first set of clothes he found. "Still... It's good to know for sure. Think we'll be able to get in touch soon?"

_**Difficult to say. Oriande does not work like this plane.** _

"You know about Oriande?"

Black rumbled, her amusement bubbling in Shiro's chest. _**Of course. We were born there. A piece of us lives there still, even if it is by now almost wholly separate.**_

Shiro sat back, speechless. The birthplace of the lions. He'd always known such a place existed, of course, but on some level he'd assumed the lions had simply been built on Altea out of mundane materials.

But then, the lions' bodies and the consciousness that inhabited them were two entirely different things. No Altean had the skill to _build_ a sentient being, mundane materials or otherwise. He should have realized that consciousness had come from somewhere else.

Shaking his head, Shiro brought his attention back to the matter at hand. "Black... We need to talk about what happened. About Zarkon."

Black rumbled her assent, but said nothing.

Shiro hesitated. "Is now a good time? I mean, are you okay to talk about it? I know these things are..." He breathed out a laugh. "I know how I get when someone pushes me. We don't need to do this right now if you don't want to."

 _ **No. It is fine.**_ Black's gears creaked in a way that sounded very much like a sigh. _**You are correct. We must speak of this. We should have spoken of it long ago.**_

She extended a tendril of her Quintessence to him, and he sensed the astral plane waiting on the other side of the offer. He hesitated only a moment--he'd brushed up against Black's Heart a few times since they'd been captured, but he'd tried not to linger. Being there reminded him too much of watching his body act without his consent.

But this was Black, and Haggar was nowhere nearby. Even if she were, they'd removed her arm. She couldn't get to him now.

Breathing in deeply to steady himself, Shiro accepted Black's tacit offer. He had a brief sensation of falling, and then he landed with a small splash in the shallow sea. Black was much closer here, and he sensed her unease more keenly--but he also sensed her protectiveness, and her fondness. He leaned into her mind, willing himself to relax. He closed his eyes, centering himself and shoving away unhelpful memories.

"Okay," he said. "So let's talk."

* * *

Oriande was a living dream.

Allura kept getting lost in the sights, Aneta's words passing her by as she stared at the monuments all around her. A statue in the style of the ancients cast its shadow across the street here, where merchants sold goods that seemed bizarrely mundane for a timeless city of lore. Fruit, clothing, paints and canvas, little crystal carvings. And there down the street was a fountain that might have been built in the Altean capital five hundred years before Allura's birth.

The city boggled the mind: a sprawling silver metropolis in a patchwork of architectural styles. Her first glimpse of it, when she'd emerged from the Welcome Center, had made her think for a moment that an entire city had somehow been transplanted from Old Altea to this pocket dimension. It seemed a city built to sustain millions, but what Allura couldn't fathom was why.

"Aneta," she said, tearing her eyes away from another group of pilgrims coming towards them down the street. They were far from the first travelers Allura had seen here, and like several other groups they'd passed, not a single one was Altean. "Has Oriande always been like this?"

Aneta's mouth hung open for a moment as she reeled in whatever lecture she was giving at the moment. She had an uncanny ability to fill the silence, and she'd hardly stopped talking in the hour since they'd met. "Like what?" she asked.

"Outside of time."

"Not forever." Aneta turned, walking backwards in front of the group. "At the time of its founding, Oriande really was just a tiny little temple on a forgotten moon. The original sages were drawn to that place by its unique Quintessence, and they spent their time studying the very earliest forms of Altean magic. It was just the five of them at the temple for the span of many lifetimes. The five of them, and later the students and devout who sought them out. Then for some reason they decided to separate Oriande from the rest of the universe. This would have been, oh, a generation or two before your time, Princess Allura."

"You don't know why they made Oriande like this?" Val asked.

Aneta shook her head. "They didn't tell us. The first sages remained in the outside world to pass their final days in peace and contemplation while the rest of us were brought in here together with the temple. The new sages were chosen, the city was built, and we adjusted to our new life."

"You mean you've been here since the founding of this city?" Allura asked, dumbfounded. That must have been generations ago, if the founders of this city had not only built it up, but also grown the population to fill it.

"Of course," Aneta said. "Oriande is unchanging. No visitors are permitted to stay past sundown, and none of us here have had children--too complicated," she added at Matt's puzzled look.

No children? No immigrants? Allura shook her head. Even if the city wasn't full to bursting, there had to be thousands of people here--far more than there should have been at a secluded forest temple on a forgotten moon.

Allura glanced again at the lines of stalls on the street. She'd noticed before, almost subconsciously, how similar many of the merchants looked, but only now did she realize what it meant. "Oriande is outside time,” she said. “Does that mean time is cyclical here?"

Val, Matt, and Edi all swiveled to look at Allura, who ignored their shock and kept her eyes on Aneta. It made sense--the insistence that everyone leave before sundown, the city that seemed far too large for the populace it contained, the warning not to go seeking knowledge of the future (a particularly pressing concern if, as Allura suspected, every pilgrim to ever visit Oriande was here on this day, the only day in the history of the city.)

Aneta blinked once, then smiled. "You know, not many people figure that out without being told. But--you're right. It's part of the whole timelessness package. We all still age, for what it's worth. Oriande might reset each night, but those of us who live here don't. We just find a new bed to sleep in, get up in the morning, and do the next thing that needs to be done. There's only about a hundred of us here, you know, so everyone ends up doing every job eventually. You start in construction and public works, then move on to administrative tasks, then you work as a guide. I'm not one of the sages, but I know I’ll end up working as a temple assistant, so I've got that to look forward to."

Val had dropped back a few steps, staring at the ground in stunned silence, while Edi gaped at Aneta and Matt devolved into a pout.

"What, so you get to know your future, but the rest of us can't?"

Aneta laughed. "We can't throw the whole universe out of balance by trying to change things. Plus, it's kind of impossible to live here and not run across a couple dozen other copies of yourself over the course of your day. You get used to it."

"I guess..."

Aneta beamed, then continued on her tour, pointing out some museums up ahead and explaining how and why they'd been founded. Allura once more tuned her out. The whole tour was intended to give them the time they needed to weigh the Question they were to ask the sages.

Instead, it gave Allura time to consider something else.

Her father had come here once, together with the paladins. Allura had been younger then, less interested in old legends and the duties of a paladin, and the adults had said nothing upon their return. Sacred knowledge, they'd called it. A highly personal experience.

But they were here. Now. All Allura had to do was find them and she might be able to warn them. She might be able to _save_ them.

But when she caught sight of a familiar face in the crowd filling the plaza up ahead, it wasn't her father's face she saw. It wasn't any face from her past, welcome or otherwise.

It was Matt, his face more deeply lined than ever. He reached up to rub his forehead but caught sight of Allura at that moment and froze, every inch of him stilling. She could imagine that he'd also stopped breathing. His eyes fluttered closed for just an instant. His shoulders rose and fell in a sigh. Then he turned and strode toward her, twisting his body to slip through the crowd.

"Right, I forgot about this part," he said when he finally reached them, his voice nearly making the first Matt jump out of his skin. The other Matt's lips quirked upward, and he offered an awkward wave. "Hey, guys. Small universe, huh?"

* * *

Keith didn't have to turn to know that Arel was watching him. So far each time he came to the rebel meetinghouse, Arel was there, hackles up and eyes glued to the back of Keith's head. It was too consistent to be a coincidence, no matter how intently Arel tried to focus on the various projects he brought along to keep his hands busy.

"Ignore him," Thace muttered, drifting closer.

Keith couldn't stop his ears sloping back as he glanced sidelong at Thace. He'd kept his distance since their talk yesterday--not exactly avoiding Keith, but not initiating conversations except for ones centered around the mission they'd run this morning. (It was a supply run today, not another jail break, and Keith's throat had closed when he found out. He wondered if Mirek was mad at him for changing the parameters of the last mission.)

But it seemed to just be Arel who had a problem with Keith's recurring visits to the rebellion. He greeted Keith when he walked in with a smirk and a, "drul Vorsek." Keith knew he was just doing it to get under his skin, but knowing that didn't make it any less effective.

"I _am_ ignoring him," Keith muttered, his claws digging into his arms. They'd already finished debriefing on the day's mission, which was a success by anyone's standards. Thace had created the perfect distraction, allowing Keith and Lance to sneak into the warehouse and steal the comms units--fresh from the factory line and not yet programmed with the surveillance software that cropped up here and there on the homeworld.

That part of the meeting had gone fine. The problem was that Mirek had withdrawn into a private room to discuss something with another agent, which left Keith without anything to focus on besides Arel's glares from the back of the room.

Lance didn't seem to be having that problem. He'd taken a seat atop a nearby table, his leg jangling to a rhythm as he hummed a tune Keith only vaguely recognized. He leaned his weight back on his hands, which occasionally joined in on the music to drum out a beat on the table, and Keith had a feeling if he'd been standing he would have been dancing to music only he could hear.

Some of Keith's anxiety drained away at the sight. He couldn't begrudge Lance his good mood--not after their conversation with the rest of the team. Lance had talked to Hunk again this morning before the mission, and then he'd gone to give Thace puppy eyes until Thace agreed to try to get permission from Mirek to leave for a couple of days. (Not that they _needed_ permission, exactly, but this alliance was too fresh to expect it to last one party disappearing without warning.)

Lance stretched out his leg, prodding Keith with his toes. "Hey. Lighten up. Today's a good day! We stole some stuff, we made a good impression on the bosses, we might get to go and see Hunk and Shay for their Unity...."

Keith's lips quirked in a smile as Lance trailed off, getting a dopey smile that had been a fixture on his face on and off for the last few days. "Yeah," Keith said. "I know. We've been gone for a long time."

"We have." Lance's fidgeting slowed for a moment. Then he caught Keith watching him and reached out with his leg again. Keith deflected it this time, suppressing a smile. "And, hey! You'll get to see Shiro and Akira again, even if it turns out Matt can't make it."

Keith had to admit that sounded nice. He hadn't thought he would miss his friends this much, but after talking to everyone and then seeing Matt in the Heart, he couldn't ignore the ache in his chest, like the distance between them was a physical hole that had opened up inside him.

It was a new sensation, but not unwelcome, even if it did ache whenever he thought to hard about them.

"Sorry to keep you waiting," Mirek said, reemerging from the back room.

Thace shook his head. "We understand. I'm sure you have a lot of moving parts to keep track of in this operation."

She nodded, her cybernetic arm whirring as she ran her fingers through her thin hair. "Right... you wanted to talk about leaving the homeworld. Something about a friend of yours back home...?"

Lance kicked his legs, beaming. "Hunk," he said. "My best friend. He's declaring Unity, which is a big freaking deal."

Somewhere behind Keith, Arel snorted, and Keith's hands tightened on his arms. Lance appeared not to have heard.

Mirek tilted her head to the side, the pupil of her cybernetic eye constricting as she studied Lance. "I can see that."

"We wouldn't be gone long," Thace assured her. "Allowing for travel time, perhaps three or four homeworld days?"

"Which is plenty of time to pass information along to their buddies in the Empire and organize an attack before we think to get suspicious." Arel kept his voice low, but that didn't mean the sound didn't carry to everyone in the room.

Keith barely resisted the urge to go for a weapon. "If we wanted to sell you out, don't you think we'd wait until we had more information? I mean, what is it we're supposed to be passing along to the Empire? Two locations you can clear out of in ten minutes flat? The seven whole people we've met?" Keith had his doubts that anyone was who they claimed to be, anyway. Besides Arel, he expected that everyone had given false names, and he kept going back and forth on whether Mirek really was the leader of the rebellion. The leader of this cell, maybe.

But Thace brought his hand down on Keith's shoulder, halting his rant there, which was probably for the best. It would do no good to further antagonize Arel over this.

(It would be damn cathartic, though.)

"We've been over this, Arel," Mirek said. "We trusted the _Nezai_ before we knew who they were, and we've confirmed for ourselves that these two defected."

Arel opened his mouth, then growled, jamming a pair of pliers into the device he was working on and ripping out a delicate metal plate.

Mirek frowned at him, then turned back to Keith and the others. "Go. It's not like I could order you to stay, anyway."

"Perhaps not," Thace said, "but we're also doing more than independent jobs now. We wouldn't want to put you in jeopardy by leaving."

There was a soft but emphatic _snap_ , and Keith turned to look at Arel. Far from carefully adjusting the device he'd been working on (some sort of camera, Keith thought), Arel seemed now to merely be destroying it, ripping out wires, plates, and circuit boards without regard for collateral damage.

"We'll find a way to endure without you," Mirek said dryly.

"You're not serious." Arel tossed the camera onto the table beside him and stood, ears quivering in rage. "You're letting them go? Just like that?"

Mirek's face remained impassive, but a line of violet lights illuminated along the length of her arm, the glow pulsing slightly. "Careful, now."

Arel faltered, his posture stiffening. "Sorry, ma'am. I'm just saying."

"You're concerned," she said. "That's not in itself a bad thing in this line of work, but there is such a thing as taking it too far..." She paused, crossing her arms over her chest. "What would it take for you to be comfortable with this? With them?"

Arel's gaze darted toward Keith, and his expression darkened. "I don't know that I'll ever be _comfortable_ ," he said. "But to start, you could send someone with them to this... 'Unity' thing."

"You don't have to be so condescending, you know," Lance muttered, his good mood finally punctured. "Fine, you don't trust us. But don't go acting like this isn't a big deal for Hunk and Shay."

Mirek, though, seemed only amused by Arel's attitude. "All right. Pack your things, Arel."

Keith's heart sank as Arel spun, his jaw dropping. " _What?_ "

"Eyes on the ground," Mirek said. "It's not a bad idea, and you're one of the best we have."

Arel spluttered a protest that Keith very nearly echoed. This was supposed to be a chance to get _away_ from Arel, not to be stuck in even closer quarters for the next few days.

But Mirek only smiled, nodded to Thace, and turned to a messenger who had just ducked in from another room. Keith turned to Arel, a scowl on his face. Arel stared after Mirek for a long while, then composed himself and met Keith glare for glare.

"Fine. Looks like we'll be spending the next few days together, Vorsek--and I'll be in constant contact with our ops team, so don't think for a second that just because we're alone out there, that makes me an easy target."

"I'll try to restrain myself," Keith said, his father's name grating on his nerves. "But I wouldn't go provoking me more than you have to."

(It probably was a mistake, antagonizing him like this, but Keith had to admit the look of terror on his face as Keith walked out was worth it.)

* * *

Matt had to sit down.

There were two of him and, okay, maybe that shouldn't have surprised him so much after Aneta had explained Oriande's cyclical time-stream. All this really meant was that he came back here at some point in the future. (Probably? The people here seemed awfully invested in maintaining a stable timeline, but he wasn't sure if that was because it was inevitable or because it _wasn't_.)

The hard part was that he knew himself too well to miss the tension buzzing beneath his counterpart's skin. Future Matt plastered on a smile, but it didn't reach his eyes, and he seemed impatient to get away. He kept looking over his shoulder, too, and it took Matt entirely too long to realize that his counterpart wouldn't be here alone.

"All right, all right," Aneta said, her own voice pitching a little higher as she held up her hands. "Everyone breathe. This sort of thing happens more often than you might think." She paused, glancing to Future Matt. "I mean, not this _exactly._ Most people don't actually come back to Oriande after their first visit. But the city isn't _that_ big, and the temple's even smaller. Lots of people run into people they know! Or people they know _of_."

It sounded like she was trying to convince herself that this was normal, which actually comforted Matt more than if she'd been blasé about the whole thing. It was weird enough seeing his duplicate without feeling like he should have been more chill about it.

Matt's counterpart looked behind himself one more time, then groaned.

"What?" Matt asked.

His counterpart opened his mouth, but he seemed lost for words. "Just... You'll see?"

Allura wasn't satisfied with that explanation (not that Matt blamed her), and she crossed her arms. "What--?"

"Matt!"

Matt turned automatically toward Akira's voice, though his counterpart only lifted his hands and began massaging his temples as Akira appeared from the crowd, pausing to let a merchant pass with a hovering metal crate. An Altean with the same green guide sash as Aneta scurried after Akira, their face pinching with dread at the sight of the other group.

Akira only raised an eyebrow, his steps slowing as he approached. "Oh," he said. "Right. This is--?"

"Yep," Future Matt said.

"Huh." Akira scratched his chin. "So that's why you...?"

"Uh-huh. For all the good it'll do."

Akira bobbed his head. "Right."

Val leaned back against a nearby lamppost, studying Future Matt and Akira. "You wanna share with the class, or is this gonna be one of those irritating paperback novel plots where you just keep vagueing to keep the drama alive?"

"Does this 'vagueing' thing mean you don't share any specifics?" the other group's guide asked. "Because in that case, I would like to register my vote for that option."

Akira looked at Matt--his Matt, Future Matt, whatever they were calling him--who turned and walked back the way he'd come just as Keith and Nyma appeared, skirting another group of pilgrims. As though Matt weren't already uneasy enough about this whole thing. Keith carried the same tension as Akira and Future Matt, but unlike the two of them, Keith wore it openly, one hand fiddling with the hem of his sleeve. He glanced around like he was expecting enemies, and when he spotted Matt and his friends, he froze.

Matt hadn't understood the dress code until now, but suddenly it made entirely too much sense. Because this group carried themselves like people fresh from a disaster, and Matt automatically searched them for new scars. But the robes, hoods, and gloves did their jobs, concealing any physical marks of what might have happened between one visit and the next. His crystal scars didn't seem any different, at least, but that was a small comfort.

Keith's hood shifted, and Matt didn't have to see his ears to know they'd just gone back. His stomach twisted itself in knots as Keith took a step forward, his mouth dropping open.

"You're-- You're from before, aren't you? Back when Lance and I were still on the homeworld."

Matt's counterpart grabbed Keith's arm as he started forward, and for a moment the lighthearted mask dropped away. "Keith," he said.

Keith wrenched his arm away. "Don't give me that. Isn't this what we were hoping for? A way to change things?"

Aneta and the other guide both paled at that, Aneta giving a strained laugh and trying to direct attention toward the glyphs carved into the base of a statue they'd passed half a block back. ("The first sages really were quite amazing, don't you think?") The other guide opted for a more direct intervention, but Keith just snarled at them as Akira held up his hands.

"Keith--"

"No!" Keith cried. "We have to warn them!" He turned, meeting Matt's eyes, and the plea in his voice made Matt's heart stop. "Listen to me. Haggar's--"

He vanished before he got another word out, shrinking to a speck of white light in the blink of an eye, and Matt let out an involuntary cry as he stumbled back, horrified. "What the _hell_?" He rounded on Aneta, who was still stubbornly reciting a translation of the runes. "What was that? What did you do to him?"

She cut off with a squeak, shrinking down. She was already short for an Altean, and when she cowered she looked as young as Edi, who had her hands clapped over her mouth as she stared at the place Keith had been.

"Safeguards, remember?" Matt's counterpart sounded, if anything, bored, and Matt turned to find him sprawled out on a bench, his head tilted back to stare at the clouds overhead--an entire sea of them, pink and white and orange and blazing with Quintessence. His hood had fallen back, and he tugged it up again, pulling it so it covered his eyes. "You try and screw with the timeline and you get up in extra-dimensional time-out. They warned us about it when we got here, and I warned Keith before we even left the castle, but hey, what do I know? I've only seen this entire disaster play out once already."

Akira flicked the top of Future Matt's head, and he pulled his hood back enough to squint up at Akira. Something passed between them, and Matt grunted once before tugging his hood down to his nose.

"Okay," Val said, biting her thumbnail, "but what about Keith? Is he going to be okay?"

"He is unharmed," the other group's guide said. "The sages have separated him from the rest of you until he calms down enough to remember the expectations."

Akira gave Future Matt's shoulder one last squeeze, then spun on his heel, flashing a sharp smile at his guide. "Yeah... We're not gonna do that, if it's all the same to you."

The guide puffed up, indignant. "Excuse me? I'm not going to--"

"Yeah, whatever." Akira brushed past them, turning his attention to Matt. "Hey. Wanna know a secret? Turns out I--"

Akira vanished the same way Keith had, but not without a smug little grin that would have made Matt laugh in another situation. He didn't feel much like laughing now. More like throwing up. Something had gone very, _very_ wrong between now and whenever these versions of his friends came from.

The other group's guide had gone purple, muttering under their breath about the _nerve_ of some people.

"Oh, shut up, Lovis," Nyma said, knocking Future Matt's feet off the bench so she could sit down. "Akira did you a favor."

"A favor?" Lovis seethed. "Deliberate recklessness--the insolence of it--not to mention disrespect for the very foundations of--"

"Piece of advice?" Future Matt said, dragging himself upright on the bench. "None of us is in the mood to deal with this shit, Keith least of all. So unless _you_ want to deal with a panicky, pissed-off Galra with a bayard, I'd suggest you let Akira talk him down."

Nyma leaned her cheek on her hand. "And a little thank you when he gets back wouldn't be a bad idea, either."

"A _thank you_ \--" Lovis began, but Matt overrode him, the sick feeling in his center rising into his throat. He needed something--anything else to think about besides the fear slowly taking root in his lungs.

"Talk him down," Matt said. "Does that mean Akira went to wherever they took Keith?"

His counterpart propped his elbows on the back of the bench and shrugged. "I mean, it _is_ Akira."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Edi demanded.

Future Matt smiled at her, the sharp edge to his voice softening for just a moment. "It means Akira has good instincts, especially when it comes to me and Keith."

Oh. Well that was certainly something else to think about. Matt stared at his counterpart, his thoughts grinding to a halt as realization smacked him in the face. Akira was... Well of _course_ he was. It was so obvious Matt felt like he should have figured it out sooner.

"Akira," he whispered. "He's our adjunct, isn't he?"

* * *

"Okay," Hunk said. "Okay, so what about vows? Are there prewritten ones? Do I need to memorize them? I should probably start memorizing them now, otherwise I'm going to forget them in the middle of the ceremony and then I'll be all embarrassed and the whole day will be ruined and--"

"Hunk." Shay grabbed his hands as they reached for his head, pulling them down between them. He'd already run his fingers through his hair so many times he had permanent furrows, but he couldn't seem to stop himself. Lance, Keith, and Thace were on their way from the homeworld, and his Uncle Eli would get here early tomorrow (with the Mendozas, partly because they were excited for Hunk but mostly because it had been half a year since they'd seen Lance) and it had hit home, again, that this was really happening.

He forced himself to breathe as Shay sang a calming melody, letting it come into her voice so he could hear it. "Sorry," he said. "I just want this to be perfect."

"It will be," she said. "And there is no need to worry. Each declaration is unique, so there is no script to follow. So long as you speak from the heart, it will be perfect."

He flushed, covering his face with his hands as tears sprang to his eyes. The past few days had been an emotional roller coaster--stress alternating with excitement and random bursts of intense emotion he could never put a name to that nevertheless left him a blubbering mess. "Sorry," he said, sucking in a shuddering breath. "I don't mean to be a nervous wreck. I just--"

"You wish everything to go well," she said, pressing her forehead to his. "I understand. I... am much the same." Her skin grew warm, and her song took a dip toward the bashful, its tempo growing more frantic. Hunk pulled back, humming a question. "The scholars from Metos are here, yes?"

"Yeah..." Hunk frowned. Talks with the other Balmerans had gone surprisingly well, especially once Coran led a group of Alteans to recharge the other Balmera so they could begin roaming. Both peoples had sent a small group of historians to the other Balmera to exchange knowledge. The Metos Balmerans--history keepers, in their language--had retained a greater volume of tales from before the Empire, but Shay's people—who had recently named themselves the Theros, the liberated—remembered other things, and had some experience with tending to a roaming Balmera and attempting to navigate as they did. "So?"

Shay rubbed the back of her neck. "So I went to them last night after the Meet. I wished to know if our people had forgotten some vital aspect of the Unity."

Hunk blinked at her, then grinned, giving her arm a squeeze. "Okay, so it's not just me. What, uh, what did they say?"

"The Unity is a simple declaration, with no more ceremony than those declaring wish there to be. The only requirement is that it happen in the heart of the Balmera so we may touch the crystal and be bound together."

"Good to know." Hunk breathed in and forced himself to release some of his nerves on the exhale, then turned back to the desk beside his bed. Shay had convinced the Balmera to reshape this chamber for him to include a desk, since Hunk had been taking notes on the Unity ceremony for the last few days, and he'd always found it easier to write by hand.

He sat at the desk now, shifting through pages of scribbled notes and jumbled, half-formed thoughts, before finally giving up and grabbing a new page.

"Okay, so I'm gonna write out something, because I'm me, and I'll completely blank if I don't have something to go off of." He jotted down, _vows_ , then looked up at Shay. "Everyone's set to arrive by tomorrow--everyone who can make it, anyway." He felt a twinge of disappointment--they still hadn't heard back from Allura, Matt, or Val, and Meri's communications had become shorter and less frequent in recent weeks. Hunk had already resigned himself to not having her at the declaration, which was a bigger disappointment than he'd expected, considering he'd only known her for a few weeks before she left to go spy, but he'd really been hoping the others would be able to make it, at least.

But it was something of a miracle that Lance and Keith had been able to get away from the homeworld at all, and they had a very narrow window in which to do it. If Hunk and Shay delayed, it might be months before everyone could get together again, and by then who knew what the war would look like.

 _Do it,_ his mom had told him. He'd been pacing and ranting for over an hour at that point, and her firm tone had caught him off guard. _It's hard enough to coordinate schedules in the middle of ordinary life. With the war? Pshh. This is for you and Shay first. They'll understand._

 _Besides,_ Mama had added. _Two receptions mean twice as many gifts._

Her cheeky smile still made him chuckle, and he doodled a Voltron V on his to-do list. "Mama's organizing food, and Akira's got the Guard on duty all day so hopefully we won't have to handle any emergencies. Is there anything I'm forgetting?"

"Nothing," Shay said. "I have said it before, Hunk. This is a simple ceremony. You need not stress so."

He offered her a crooked smile. "I stress about everything." That, and his only point of reference for any of this was a wedding, which significantly increased his expectations both for extravagance and his own stress levels. "Okay. You have any more Elder stuff to do between now and then?"

She shook her head. "The others will coordinate with Metos to try to navigate together, but I am not needed for that process. I have nothing urgent--not until we decide the next Balmera we will free and begin this process again."

"Great! Then I guess we should head back to the castle to meet Lance and Keith when they get in. Did your parents want to come?"

Hunk's communicator chirped at him, indicating an incoming call. He rarely wore his armor around the Balmera, but he kept his comm on hand, just in case. He wasn't expecting a call right now, though, and his mind immediately went to disaster. Had Zarkon returned? Or maybe one of their allies was under attack.

Cursing, Hunk hastily accepted the call, a breathless question on his lips. It died in the next instant as he recognized Meri. She sat in a dark cockpit, shadows under her eyes.

"Hunk," she said. "Good. Is Shay there? I didn't get an answer on her comm."

"I am here," Shay said, stepping forward. Hunk switched the comm over to a wider visual feed, then set it on the desk. His initial alarm had faded, but he was still uneasy for the simple fact that Meri was in touch--and using her own face on the comms, at that. Shay, it seemed, was thinking the same thing. "Are you well? Has something happened?"

Meri jerked back, stunned. "Me? I'm fine." She pinched the bridge of her nose, shaking her head. "Sorry, it's been a little hectic lately. My cover story got a promotion thanks to a little snot taking an extended vacation, and now I'm dealing with paperwork like you wouldn't believe. But--no, sorry. This isn't about me. I heard. About the attack. Shay... How are you doing?"

Shay's breath hitched, and she blinked rapidly, leaning against Hunk as he put an arm around her. "I am well," she said. "Better than the first few days."

"I'm so sorry, Shay. I wish I was there right now so I could give you a hug, but I barely managed to get away long enough to call."

"You did not need to risk all that just for me."

Meri's smile turned sad. "Of course I did. I've lost people, too. I'm just glad you've got someone there to hug you for me." She lifted a finger, pointing it threateningly at Hunk. "You make sure to hug her for me, you hear?"

"Always," Hunk said, pulling Shay closer and rubbing her arm. "Actually, uh--did you hear? We sent you a message last week."

"The Unity? Yeah. I'm so happy for you guys. Both of you. You deserve a little bit of happiness. I wish I could be there, but--"

"I know." Hunk managed a smile, bittersweet though it was. "The life of a spy."

Meri lifted one shoulder. "I'll be thinking of you. And I'm looking for Rax, of course. Between you two and me and Pidge, we're gonna tear this empire apart in no time flat. Just watch. We'll get your brother back."

Shay nodded. "Thank you, Meri."

She nodded, lifting a hand like she meant to reach through the comms to give them both a hug. Remembering where she was, she faltered, and her hand fell to the console. "I miss you guys."

"We miss you, too," Hunk said. "I know you're doing important stuff, but we do all miss you. Promise you'll come back safe?"

"Promise." Meri's tone rang hollow, and her smile didn't quite reach her eyes, but before Hunk's unease took root, she'd leaned back, the dim lighting of the cockpit painting deep shadows across her face. "Anyway, I'm gonna give Allura a call while I've got the chance. You two take care of yourselves, and eat some extra cake for me or, well, whatever you do at a Unity. Bye!"

There was no break in her words for Hunk to step in and warn her that Allura had been out of touch for the last few days. Meri cut the line, and they were left in silence. Hunk bit his lip, his insides churning, but he told himself it was for the best. Everyone kept saying that Allura and the others were fine--they'd probably found Oriande, and something about the magic there put them out of comms range. Meri would be disappointed when she couldn't reach Allura, but she wouldn't worry as much if she thought it was bad timing as she would if she knew how long this had been going on.

Shaking himself, Hunk pocketed his comm, then turned to Shay, who hastily wiped away her tears.

"Ready to go?" he asked.

She nodded, and they grabbed their things before heading over to the chambers Hunk's mothers had been using during their stay.

* * *

“He’s our adjunct, isn’t he?”

Matt's voice was soft, but it wasn't a question, not really. Allura heard that in his voice, and she saw the confirmation in the other Matt's smile--quickly smothered as Lovis rounded on him.

"What the quiznak is wrong with you people?" they demanded. "Don't mess with the timeline! That's all we ask! Is that _really_ so hard to do?"

Matt's counterpart held up his hands. "Hey, you're the one who just confirmed it for them. I wasn't gonna say a word."

Lovis rounded on him, spluttering, and he smiled as Nyma laughed into her hand.

Interesting.

Allura studied the other group, wishing she knew more about the safeguards the sages had put in place. They claimed it was to prevent pilgrims from gaining knowledge about their own futures, and yet it seemed the system wasn't infallible. What triggered it, then? Could they pass other information through?

Lovis looked like they were about ready to explode, but Aneta stepped in before that happened, forcing a smile that was more of a grimace and spreading her hands in a supplicating gesture. "We should get going. Sights to see, Questions to ponder--you know."

"But--" Matt stopped himself there, biting his lip. For a moment he looked almost as strained as the other version of him, and Allura noted once more how little time must have passed between visits. She was no expert on human aging, but even Keith and Nyma hardly seemed older than they had been when Allura left to train with Fligg. She would place this visit a few months in the future, perhaps a year or two at the outer limit.

The other Matt leaned back, stretching his hands over his head. "It's not Shiro."

Lovis squawked in indignation while Nyma turned away, barely smothering her giggles, but Allura had eyes only for her Matt, her heart in her throat. Matt looked like he might collapse from sheer relief--and no wonder. Allura had been so concerned with trying to outwit the sage's safeguards that she hadn't even stopped to think what must be going through Matt's head. Matt, Keith, and Akira all here together and all looking like they were struggling to put on a brave face? What else would he have thought?

"Relax, Lovis," Matt's counterpart said. "I'm doing you a favor."

"By continuing your flagrant disregard for the laws of Oriande?"

Nyma arched an eyebrow. "He's not actually spoiling anything," she pointed out. "The opposite, actually."

Gesturing to Nyma, Matt's counterpart nodded. "Exactly! Look, I was him, so I know he was already thinking it. If I hadn't said anything, I just would have tried harder to find out what happened, and it would've given Aneta a heart attack trying to reel me in. This way I cool my jets a little and you don't have to worry about me reading into the fact that you won't let me ask the question I want to ask." He frowned. "Wait, I cool my jets or _he_ cools _his_ jets? I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to talk about Past Me. Do you guys have norms for this sort of thing? You've gotta have norms for this sort of thing; you see yourselves on a daily basis--literally."

If he was trying to distract Lovis from anger over the slip, it didn't work. They just crossed their arms, lavender _glaes_ standing out against their flushed cheeks, and glared at him until he sighed.

"Look, if it was an issue it wouldn't have happened at all, right? How'd you explain it, Aneta?"

Aneta jumped, eyes going wide. "Wh-what?"

"The universe's built-in course correction mechanism."

Shooting a nervous look at Lovis, Aneta tugged at a lock of mint green hair. "Oh. Um, well, that is true. The universe can correct for minor deviations in the flow of cause and effect. The safeguard overlooks that sort of thing so we don't end up wasting time and energy."

"A city like this?" Nyma asked. "You'd never catch it all, anyway. You've gotta pick your battles."

"Exactly." Matt's counterpart flashed Nyma a smile. "That's what I'm doing. I'd love to tell them all about why we're here, but I know that's not gonna happen. So let me have this."

Lovis closed their eyes, pinching the bridge of their nose, then finally sighed. "Fine. Fine! Nothing I can do about it now." They turned to Aneta. "You should go. The longer we stay here, the more likely they are to force an intervention, and I don't need that kind of paperwork."

Aneta nodded hastily and turned to Allura. "Shall we? I can show you the Museum of Royals--each of your ancestors has a room. All the way back to Queen Antora!"

She sounded desperate now, and Allura doubted Lovis would let anything else slide, so she nodded, touching Matt's arm when he lingered. She suspected he wanted to stay long enough to see that Keith and Akira were okay, but there was no telling how long that would take. It was probably better that they not be here by then, anyway, if only so that Keith didn't work himself up again trying to pass along what obviously fell under the heading of forbidden knowledge.

Besides, Allura had learned all she needed to from this encounter: the sages might have safeguards in place, but they weren't absolute. Which meant, if she was careful, she might be able to pass along a warning of her own. Heart pounding, she fell in line behind Aneta as she led the group deeper into the city.

Allura's parents were here, somewhere. The odds were not in her favor, but there was still a chance she could save them.

All she had to do was find them.

* * *

Shiro focused on breathing as visions of the last battle formed and dissolved around him. This place--the sea of stars that stretched on as far as he could see in all directions--it was more real, more tangible than the true Heart of the Black Lion. They weren't as deep here, which meant this place retained an approximation of the physical. Shiro still had form, and he could feel the ground beneath him and the water lapping at his ankles.

But he also had at least one foot in Black's mind, which meant he could still catch glimpses of her thoughts. Not as vividly as he had when he'd been captured and he, Black, and Allura had pulled together to shelter from Haggar's magic. But the memories were still there.

He saw himself, pale and wide-eyed, grasping at the controls inside Black's cockpit like a drowning man clinging to a piece of driftwood. He felt, again, the panic setting in as his control slipped away, and saw himself hold tighter to the controls. He felt Black balk, and saw an even fainter reflection of the memories she'd showed him then--of Zarkon seizing control of her and turning her weapons against innocent worlds.

His stomach twisted, and he blinked to clear his eyes. The Black Lion sat before him, tall and unmoving, and he rested a hand on her paw to ground himself. "I'm sorry," he said, his voice echoing oddly in this space.

The visions flickered out, and he felt Black's shame rise to meet his. She was sorry, too. Sorry that she'd reacted as she had in the moment, sorry she'd dragged him here only to make him relive it. Frowning, Shiro pressed down harder on her paw, though he wasn't sure she could feel the difference.

"It's not your fault," he said. "We're the same, in a lot of ways. I've only just started to appreciate that. We've both been made to do things we regret, and--and we're both just trying to cope with that."

Once, not so long ago, it might have felt odd to say that a machine had PTSD, but he knew Black infinitely better now than he had at first and he felt, if anything, he should have noticed sooner. He'd known that she was bonded to Zarkon. He'd known how much Zarkon's betrayal had hurt Allura and Coran. He could have put two and two together.

Black rumbled, the first sound she'd made since bringing him here. _**That is not your fault. I hid this from you... Tried not to burden you with it.**_

Shiro's lips quirked upward at that because, yeah. He understood that, too. For as long as he'd been a paladin, he'd fought not to let his struggles show through. Allura saw most of it, by virtue of being inside his head, though she'd been gone so long she couldn't possibly know how much it had all piled up recently. Matt heard some, too, on the days Shiro could put it into words. And Keith had some inkling, if only because he'd seen so much of it first-hand.

But they were all gone now, and Shiro had even learned to fake a smile for his brother. Akira was good at redirecting Shiro's nervous energy, at finding ways for him to let go and recenter--and Shiro was grateful--but he'd still only told Akira the bare bones of his story, and when he was in a bad place, he confessed to only the most surface-level complaints.

_**Communication.** _

Shiro lifted his head to stare at the underside of Black's chin. "What?"

 _ **Communication,**_ she repeated. _**We are supposed to excel at that. It is of me, as instinct is of Red. It is how I was able to give you and Allura the power to make yourselves known to your team. And yet in this...**_

"We've both failed." Shiro sighed. He turned, leaning back against Black's paw, and crossed his arms over his chest. Curiously, his prosthetic seemed almost to glow in this space. Or, no. Something within it glowed, spilling out through the seams.

Right. A little piece of Black's core was in there, powering the prosthetic and giving Shiro a psychic link to it, so he could control it as he would a hand of flesh and blood. He'd grown so used to the prosthetic these last few months that he hardly thought about it anymore. He took it off when he slept and showered, and on the rare occasion he had a day to relax in the pool or the observation room, or even just around the castle with Akira. He was getting better at doing things one-handed, but the prosthetic was so much a part of him that on more than one occasion while he was showering, he'd reached for the shampoo automatically with his right hand, only to hear a thump from the other room as his prosthetic flexed and slid off the nightstand.

He smiled now at the reminder that it wasn't just a part of him; it was a part of them both, a tangible echo of their bond.

"We can do better," he said. "We have to do better. I trust you, and I know you trust me, but I think that last fight proves that's not enough. We need to understand each other so we can avoid freezing up like that."

_**You wish for us to talk?** _

"Talking is a good start, I guess… Not that I’m a therapist, by any means."

 _ **Therapists...** **Ah.**_ Black rumbled in satisfaction. _**Yes, we had something like that on Altea, though we had other names for them.**_

"That so?" Shiro huffed out a laugh, wrapping his arms around himself. "I don't suppose we happened to pick any up from New Altea?"

Black was silent for a long moment, her mind contemplative. _**You want a therapist.**_

"I think I might need one," Shiro said. "I'm not... I can't keep going the way I have been." He'd thought the words many times over the past six months, often with an undercurrent of self-deprecation, and it had always felt a little bit like admitting defeat. He fought back against that shame now, lifting his head. "I've been trying to do this on my own for too long, and only letting it spill over to other people when it gets bad. I'm starting to realize that's not healthy." He paused, ducking his head. "Though to be honest, I've been ignoring it for a long time."

_**You should speak with Coran. He may be able to help you find someone, and he will not think less of you for it.** _

Shiro's breath caught, his heart constricting as Black caught onto the very thing he was trying not to admit to fearing. That seeking help made him weak. That anyone he went to about this would judge him for it.

He blinked back tears, rubbing his hand across Black's paw. "Okay," he whispered. "I'll talk to him. You--you might need to give me a nudge if I try to back out of it." She purred, and Shiro smiled. "But we're here now. Should we...? We should talk."

 _ **Yes.**_ Black hesitated, which Shiro found oddly comforting. At least he wasn't the only one who didn't know where to begin. _**What happened was not your fault.**_

"It wasn't yours, either," Shiro shot back. Black resisted his words, and he smiled. "Okay, well, that's somewhere to start, isn't it? Can we agree that whatever we say here, it's not about laying blame? We both have triggers, and we both may have blundered into them during that fight. But it was an accident, on both our sides."

Black agreed, pressing into his mind. _**No blame,**_ she agreed. _**But perhaps an explanation.**_

Shiro nodded, looking up at her once more, and waited. He felt her gathering her thoughts, compressing them into words. That wasn't how she usually communicated; he knew that about her. But she knew that Shiro understood better in words than in images and impulse, and the fact that she was going to that extra effort for him was touching.

 _ **I have been dominated before,**_ Black said haltingly. Flashes of Zarkon accompanied her words, along with a muted sense of horror and futile resistance. Shiro's heart clenched, and he climbed up on top of Black's paw. As large as she was, he couldn't really offer her a hug or a pat on the back, so he settled for pressing his back to her leg in the hope that his weight would be some comfort. The images Black showed him changed at once to show Shiro and Allura in Zarkon's place, Black's horror shifting to peace and pride. _**You are not like Zarkon. Not in any way that would be cause for shame. When you fly me, you do not coerce me, though I yield to your direction in battle. But having Zarkon there... it took me back.**_

Confusion. Black didn't seem to have the words for this sort of confusion, so she simply showed him her mind in that moment, carefully muffled so her panic didn't sweep him away. Shiro was glad for it, because that feeling--the jolt of fear as Zarkon brushed up against her, the haze, the swirl of conflicting thoughts as she struggled to separate past from present--

Shiro knew all to well what that felt like, and how difficult it was to remember that he was safe. Even a well-intentioned gesture might register to his mind as a threat when he was like that, and he'd lashed out at his friends without thinking.

_**I never meant to hurt you.** _

"I know." Shiro leaned into her, offering up his own memories, or fragments of them. The worst of his panic attacks. His guilt when he inadvertently hurt someone close to him. Painful though it was, there was something cathartic in the ache this time, as though sharing it with someone who had been there, who understood, released a little bit of the pressure. "Believe me, I know. Obviously the best thing to do would be to not let Zarkon get close to you again, but since that's kind of out of our control... Is there anything I can do to help, if this comes up again? Something I can do to remind you where you are? Where _we_ are?"

Black gave a noncommittal reply that Shiro could only interpret as a shrug. He gathered that this was new for her, at least by her standards, and he responded with silent sympathy. It had taken weeks for him to work out a system with Matt to ground either of them when nightmares and flashbacks hit, and even that was imperfect.

"We'll figure it out," Shiro promised. "It'll help just knowing what's happening, and that digging in my heels won't help. Assuming I can remember any of it in the moment."

Black turned questioning, nudging him gently as though to encourage him to follow her lead and open up. Communication, right? He sighed, but gathered his thoughts. He stretched for memories and images he could use to supplement his words, though he wasn't nearly fluent in that kind of communication. Hell, he was barely conversational with it, his grasp mostly limited to what he needed in battle and occasionally interpreting the messages Black sent to him.

But she purred as he presented the first memory, and that alone was worth the effort.

"I don't like not having control of my life," he said, calling up memories from the Garrison and presenting them rapid-fire. Study groups that had frustrated him because people kept challenging his ideas, early bickering with his training squad, back when Shiro had barely known them and had hated that his grades and his future rested on the performance of a couple of strangers. "I've never liked to give up control. I know that about myself, but it used to be a minor thing. It would irritate me, sure, and every now and then I'd snap at someone, but I could let it go most of the time. Then..."

He fell silent, memories of his time in the Arena rising almost without him thinking of them. He didn't know how Black had muted her memories, and he almost lost himself in them, his heart beating quicker as the sea and stars around him transformed into the sands of the Arena and the jeers of a bloodthirsty crowd. He'd fought for the Galra in the Arena. He killed innocents to appease his captors and live another day--and even then Haggar took him and broke him and made him a weapon for her to wield.

Black shifted for the first time since they'd come here, curling around him as best she could as she inserted herself into his mind like a blanket draped over his past, muffling it. He swallowed, offering up his gratitude for her intervention.

"It's worse since then," he said, his voice shaking. "It's not just that I like to be in control, it's--it's like, if I'm not in control, even for a second, they're going to find me again. Or--if I can plan out our battles ahead of time and keep everything going according to plan, then I can keep anything bad from happening. Allura's one thing--she can see into my head; she knows what I'm thinking, and I can see her thought process when she has another idea, so it's basically like me being in control myself. It's not that I don't trust the others. They're not incompetent. They just--"

His words ran out again, and he had no memories to offer up, only nightmares and worst-case scenarios that he'd conjured up in the throes of a deep, visceral terror.

When they ran out, he found another memory waiting. It had been early in his tenure as paladin, back when Allura had stepped back, insisting that Shiro was the _true_ black paladin and that her place was on the castle-ship. Things had been awkward, but Shiro had needed answers. He'd needed to know what his role was, what was expected of him. He hadn't even understood why Black had chosen him.

So he'd gone to Allura and asked her what it meant to be the black paladin.

"She said you choose people who are decisive," he said, Allura's voice seeming to echo his own. "That your paladins are always in control. It was such a relief to hear that, in some twisted way. I was falling apart, holding onto control by my fingernails, and you'd think being told I had to just keep holding on would intimidate me, but it didn't. It was--It was like--Like I was fighting against myself. Part of me wanted to break down right then and there, to spill out everything and hide away until someone else fixed things for me. That part of me didn't want to be a paladin at all. It didn't want to take any responsibility for what had happened to me or what _would_ happen.

"But there was another part of me that needed to stay in control. Breaking down, backing off--the thought of doing that terrified me. I didn't want to lead them, but I couldn't _not_. So hearing that you needed me to keep it together, it--it was like you'd given me permission to muscle through, if that makes any sense at all." He shook his head, blinking back tears. "And I don't blame _you_ for any of that. I was in a bad place, and it was the only way I coped with any of it. But then Zarkon came, and the way you were during that battle..."

He closed his eyes, emotion tightening his throat around the next words. He remembered the way she'd pleaded with him to run away. The way she'd fought his control. The way he'd started to doubt himself like he never had before. It wasn't like when Haggar took control of him, because he’d fought her with everything he had. He might not have had the strength to beat her, but he always knew that what she was doing was wrong. And it wasn't like the aftermath, when he'd broken down sobbing on Allura's shoulder as soon as he emerged from the cryopod, or like the ensuing days, when he'd been keenly aware of the cracks in himself. He'd been fragile then, and there had been moments of doubt when he went back into battle, wondering if he was up to the task. But those were isolated moments, easily drowned out.

In the latest battle, he'd floundered. It went beyond fears that he would shatter under the pressure. He'd begun to wonder whether he was headed the right direction at all, or if he was chasing Zarkon into the abyss.

Black's sorrow and guilt pulled his mind back to the present, and he shook his head, trying to impress upon her that he didn't blame her, even as his breath hitched and a single tear slipped past his guard.

 _ **No.**_ She curled tighter on herself, tucking Shiro in a pocket of black and silver and the rumble of living machinery. _**I know you do not blame me, but I am still sorry. I have always looked for people who remain in control. That is true. But I did not realize what I was asking. I see now that I have done you a disservice. You and me and Allura... and my past paladins, as well. No one can stay in control always. No one should have to try. I meant it to be something we achieved together.**_

"It's good to strive for control," Shiro whispered, "even if it's not possible. The team counts on us to lead them. If we're falling apart--"

Black quieted him with a mental nudge. _**Not falling apart. But... I would not ask for control now. It is not fair to ask you to sacrifice your own well-being for the**_ _ **ir sake**_ _ **.**_

Shiro automatically pushed back against that, an argument that the team came first dying on his lips. He made himself listen to her, keenly aware that he'd just admitted that clinging to control like this was a coping mechanism--and perhaps one it was time to leave behind. He breathed in, steadying his roiling emotions. "Okay..." he said. "Okay. Then what would you ask, if we started from the beginning?"

_**Honesty.** _

Shiro looked up, looking her in the eye as she tilted her head toward him. "Honesty?"

_**Yes. It is more difficult to ask for that than simple control, I know, and I would not require perfection, but I would ask that you be honest, first with yourself, and then with me. And then, when you can be and as much as you can be, with your team.** _

A sliver of ice wormed its way through Shiro's gut at the thought of telling the other paladins about everything he struggled with, but Black was quick to assure him that she didn't mean everything, and not all at once.

She seemed to consider something for a moment, and then she shimmered, turning translucent. The paw Shiro had been sitting on vanished, and he stumbled backwards through the shallow water as Black shrunk to a fraction of her size. In her place stood a creature about as tall as Shiro himself, luminous in a way he didn't think could be entirely explained by the quirks of the astral plane. She was black all over, lanky and furred, with violet markings on her face and back. Definitely feline, but unlike any cat Shiro had ever seen.

"What...?"

 _ **Kotha,**_ Black said--and it was her, her voice still the same as always, her golden eyes sharper as she looked into Shiro's. _**We are the first kotha, and our descendents lived on Altea, where they inspired the creation of the forms you call the lions.**_ She cocked her head to the side, purring. _**But of course you would not recognize this form.**_

She strode forward, shifting again between one step and the next, and suddenly she was an ordinary house cat, thick black fur trailing in the water that rose now to her belly. She seemed unfazed by the water, though, and peered up at him for a long moment before she gathered herself and jumped up. Shiro caught her, smiling as she settled in against his chest, purring hard enough that he could feel the vibrations in his sternum. For a moment that was all that mattered: just Shiro and Black and her warmth against his chest. Shiro's breath evened out a little more with each passing minute until he felt as though he'd found his footing once more. He reached up to wipe away his tears, and Black chased his hand with her head, rubbing her cheek against his wrist.

 _ **You are mine. You will always be mine. And I do not like to see you hurting.**_ She looked up at him, her pupils wide in the low light. Rings of gold still showed around them, and they almost seemed to be glowing. _**I trust you.**_

"I trust you, too," he said at once. "And... I'll try to be honest with you. I can't promise it will come easy, but I'll try. Maybe we can do this more. Set aside an hour a day to talk and learn more about each other."

She purred harder, butting her head against Shiro's chin. _**And you will speak to Coran about finding a therapist.**_

He cringed, but nodded. "I will."

_**Good. Now we have been in here for some time, so I should send you back. Red has returned.** _

Shiro blinked. If Red was back already, then it had been hours. Whatever distress that realization might have caused was wiped away as he realized that Red's return meant Keith and Lance were back as well. Shiro had been looking forward to seeing them since he heard they were coming, and he absentmindedly scratched Black behind the ears.

She leaned into the touch, her eyes drifting closed, and Shiro smiled.

 _ **Oh,**_ Black said. _**Yes. Blue's kitten is here.**_

"Kitten...?"

 _ **The youngest of her hoard.**_ Black's tail lashed once, and her purring stopped. _**Not the youngest**_ _ **any longer, I suppose**_ _ **. The youngest who is fully bonded to her. Lance.**_

Shiro bit down on a smile at hearing Black call Lance a kitten--not least of all because she sounded so fond of him. Then again, he shouldn't be surprised that Lance had charmed more than just his own lion. "Lance is here,” he said. “In the hangar, I assume?"

_**Yes. He asked me to tell you this, I assume so you can decide to speak to him or not.** _

She cracked her eyes open and glared at him, as though willing him to go speak with Lance, but there was no actual push from her through the bond. Shiro smiled, nodding to her. This talk had left him feeling considerably lighter than he'd been since the battle, and he saw no reason not to speak with Lance.

“Okay,” he said, pressing his face into her fur and breathing in once, deeply, before he released the connection. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

_**Tomorrow. It is a promise.** _


	26. New Foundations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Keith, Lance, and Thace are headed back to the Castle of Lions for Hunk and Shay's Unity, but they have a babysitter: Keith's old classmate Arel who has a major chip on his shoulder. Shay's people have connected with Balmerans from another Balmera to share knowledge. And Shiro had a conversation with the Black Lion in the astral plane about their trauma, which ended with a promise to work harder to understand each other in the future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, if you haven't read the side story [Rowan](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14908130/chapters/34530890) yet, I suggest you do so before starting this chapter. It provides some helpful background for Wyn's scene. There's one chapter up now, another one going up shortly, and two more coming hopefully later this week.
> 
> Secondly, season 6! If you haven't seen the new episodes yet, no need to worry. As you might expect, there will be no spoilers here.
> 
> If you _have_ watched season six, first of all, I swear to god I had this chapter written three weeks ago so the references are purely coincidental, but they made me laugh, so they're staying. Also, I'm writing a Keith-centric missing scene/post-s6 recovery fic, which you can find [ here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14943692/chapters/34624970).
> 
> Finally, this chapter officially pushes _Voltron: Duality_ over the one million word mark! Thank you so much to everyone who's read, commented, subscribed, left kudos, or otherwise joined me on this incredibly self-indulgent adventure! I love each and every one of you, and this series would never have reached this point without all your love, support, and enthusiasm! Thank you from the bottom of my heart, and know that I can't wait to get to some of what's coming up.  <3

"It's good to see you," Coran said, his relief swelling as Meri's bittersweet affection resounded in his chest. She smiled, surreptitiously wiping her eye, and scoffed.

"You're such a sap, Coran, jeez." She rolled her eyes, some of the bitterness leeching out of her like a spring unwinding. "I shouldn't be surprised that your our adjunct. How's it going with Karen?"

Coran glanced to where Karen sat at the Greens' station near the back of the bridge, a little ways outside Meri's line of sight. They'd been working through a few last minute messages from prospective allies before people started arriving for Hunk and Shay's Unity, and when Meri had called, Karen had withdrawn to give him a bit of privacy. He appreciated the gesture, though he'd always been fairly expressive in most things, and that had only increased since becoming an adjunct and getting caught off-guard at random moments by sudden bursts of emotion.

He caught Karen's eye now and smiled. "Things are going well," he said--and it was true. He wouldn't exactly call them friends quite yet, but Karen had turned up on the bridge early this morning with another apology for the way she'd initially treated him and an offer to help with preparations for the Unity. All she asked in return was the opportunity to talk with him about the adjunct bonds. "Though we're both a tad bit lost with this whole adjunct mess. It's a completely new field, and we've got to figure it out for ourselves."

"It's worse than trying to learn how to play my kids' video games," Karen muttered. "At least Matt _tried_ to teach me."

Coran hid a smile behind his hand. Pidge had tried to introduce him to Earthling games once when he'd stumbled upon them playing late at night. His attempts had only made them laugh until they began to choke, and Coran had sworn off the past time once and for all. At least when he had an audience.

Meri leaned her chin on her hands. "That's good to hear. I'm making progress on my end, too. You said Thace is coming later today? Tell him I've made contact with Dez and Ulaz. We've got a lead on Project Vindication, though it'll probably take a few more weeks before we get back anything solid."

Coran crossed his arms, leaning against the console behind him. "Take your time," he said, softening his voice. "And take care of yourself most of all. You've got a lot of people waiting for you to come home."

"Yeah." Meri turned away, scratching her cheek. "I know. I'm not taking any more risks than I have to. And--I already left a message for Allura, but could you make sure she gets it?"

Coran's voice stuck in his throat. Across the room, Karen looked up, and Coran didn't have to meet her gaze to sense her concern. His newfound empathy didn't really work on anyone other than his paladins, so far as he could tell, but he was more sensitive to emotions in a room now. Or perhaps he just thought about it more.

Either way, he ignored her and nodded to Meri. "I'll do that."

Meri disconnected soon after, her emotional high slowly settling back into the usual muddling middle ground he'd felt from her most of the last few weeks. Talking to her had done them both some good, he thought. Settled his nerves and raised her spirits. He wondered if he might be able to entice her to get away more often. Though that might be asking a lot, considering he'd just pressed for caution.

Karen laid a hand on his shoulder, making him jump. "You didn't tell her."

"About Allura?" Coran straightened, waving his hand. "I didn't want to worry her. She can't do anything from where she is now, and by the time she's in touch again, everything will be settled." He paused. "I hope."

"They're fine, Coran."

He opened his mouth to say that of course they were, there was nothing at all to worry about. Then he remembered that Karen was an adjunct, too. He frowned at her. "Are you just trying to placate me?"

She rolled her eyes. "Of course not. Don't be silly."

"Then... Green?"

Karen got a faraway look in her eyes, and she sighed, leaning against the console beside him, mimicking his posture. "I'm not sure. Maybe? It's not like the things I know about Pidge and Ryner. It's less concrete than that. At the same time, though... It doesn't feel like wishful thinking."

Humming thoughtfully, Coran smoothed his mustache. "I think I know what you mean. I've been picking up on other people's emotions sometimes, though not the same way it works with the blue paladins."

"Oh?" Karen arched an eyebrow. "Think there's some kind of bleed-through? These... talents we've been given--they're tuned to our respective paladins, but we can pick up some other things at the periphery?"

"Perhaps. In any case, it does make me feel more optimistic about Allura." He clapped her on the back hard enough to make her stumble, and she scowled at him. He laughed. "Sorry about that."

"No you're not." She shook her head, spinning to face the screen behind them, where the last few messages were still called up. "Come on. Let's get through the last of this so you can go take a quiznakking nap."

Coran drew back, clapping a hand to his chest in mock offense as Karen turned away to hide her smirk. "I'm not sure if I ought to be more offended at your language, or at the fact that you think you can order me around on my own ship."

"I've been mothering stubborn scientists for half my life, Coran. Don't think I won't turn that experience against you if you make me."

"I'd like to see you try."

She glanced sidelong at him, and he smiled, falling into a rhythm at her side. No, they weren't quite friends yet, but they were definitely headed that way. Even before her time on New Altea, Karen had had steel in her eyes, but it was sharper now, with a warrior's frame to supplement it, and in other ways she'd softened.

Or perhaps she'd simply resigned herself to the fact that her children were both now soldiers in an ancient war. She didn't fight it as she had at first. She aimed only to stand beside them.

The last few tasks went quickly enough, and Coran checked the time as he closed out of his last message. Red was due back from the homeworld at any moment now. The Greens were out doing reconnaissance on their next target and would be back later tonight, and Coran trusted Karen to know if that plan changed at all. And the New Altean ship carrying Eli and the Mendozas would be here tomorrow, with just enough time to relax before the Unity ceremony in the afternoon.

He only prayed things stayed quiet until it was over. The universe could give the paladins that much of a reprieve, surely.

The computer registered a wormhole opening nearby, and Karen straightened up with a sharp intake of breath a moment later. She blinked, pressed a knuckle to her forehead, and then burst out laughing. "Well, then," she said. "Red's back."

* * *

Lance could hardly sit still through the flight back to the castle-ship. He knew he was annoying Arel with his constant fidgeting, but he thought Keith, at least, was more amused than annoyed. He hoped that was the case, anyway, because either way he couldn't stop. Six months. More than that now, hell. This was longer than he'd ever been away from home, and during his first foray into space, which sat comfortably in second place for that record, he'd at least had Hunk with him for most of it.

Thinking of Hunk just reminded Lance of why they were headed back to the castle-ship, and his leg started bouncing again, his heel tapping against the floor. He sat against one wall of the cockpit, Thace beside him, Arel on the lone seat in the back corner, and Thace's ears twitched each time Lance's heel made a particularly sharp sound against the floor. Flushing, Lance rearranged himself so he was sitting on his feet, his legs crossed. Now it was his knee bouncing, and he was honestly impressed that Thace didn't reach out and hold it still.

Impressed, and grateful. There was too much energy burning inside him right now to hold it in. Simply sitting down, and not pacing the cockpit or hovering over Keith's shoulders and back-seat flying, took a tremendous effort. He told himself they were almost there, though he wasn't sure if that was actually true. The worst part had been getting past the blockade (a feat not made easier by Arel's sullen muttering from the back seat); now they just needed to get far enough away that their wormhole didn't show up on any Imperial scans.

Then, at last, they reached whatever arbitrary point Keith had been aiming for. A wormhole blossomed before them, and Lance launched to his feet, riding out the turbulence of the wormhole and latching onto the back of Keith's seat. He bit his lip as the milky blue light cleared, and there she was: the Castle of Lions, sleek and shimmering in the light of whatever sun the Balmera happened to be passing by today.

"Ho, there, Red Lion." Coran's voice came over the comms, crisper and more cheerful than Lance had heard it in entirely too long, and he grinned so wide his cheeks ached. "How was your flight?'

"Quiet," Keith said. He shot a look over his shoulder at Lance. "Outside the cockpit, anyway."

Lance flicked the top of his helmet. "Shut up, samurai."

Coran chuckled. He hadn't bothered with a visual feed, but Lance could picture him on the bridge, shaking his head fondly, and the image brought a surge of warmth to his chest.

"It's good to have you back, even if it's only for a few days," Coran said. "Is Thace with you?"

"I'm here." Thace appeared at Keith's other shoulder, having crossed the cockpit in perfect silence, as always. "We decided it wasn't safe leaving any of us alone on the homeworld, between the bounties and our tenuous relationship with the rebels."

"And he _missed_ you," Lance said, grinning as Thace shot him a mild glare. Okay, so he hadn't said it in so many words, but Lance could read between the lines, and Coran was, like, the one legitimate friend the guy had.

Coran was quiet for a moment, and when he went on, he was just the tiniest bit choked up. "It—I admit, it will be nice to have a competent _eshet_ opponent again. Ah, not that you’re incompetent, Lance, of course."

Lance valiantly resisted the urge to coo at them and only succeeded because Keith was glaring at him. He contented himself with a smile as he crossed one ankle behind the other and leaned forward. "Nah, it's cool. I'll catch a game or two with you before I go, but I have a feeling I'm gonna be swarmed by my family. Are they here yet, by the way?"

"Not until tomorrow, I'm afraid. But Hunk and Shay returned from the Balmera not too long ago. They planned to meet you in the hangar, if I'm not mistaken."

Lance screamed into his hands, taking care not to raise his voice too high. He'd learned the hard way that Keith and Thace both had a certain sensitivity to high-pitched sounds. Coran let them go as they neared the hangar, promising that he'd be down to welcome them home in a few moments. Lance heard someone else in the background just before the connection cut. Mrs. Holt? No way. What would she be doing hanging out with Coran?

Then they were in the hangar, and Lance spotted Hunk standing by the elevator, grinning ear to ear and clutching onto Shay as though to keep himself from sprinting out to meet them and getting himself squished by the Red Lion.

Lance didn't have those considerations to hold him back, and he sprinted for the ramp, bouncing on his toes as Keith brought them in for a landing. Red shook slightly as she touched down, and either she could sense his impatience or Keith was the best boyfriend in the universe, because Red dropped her head before Lance had time to debate the merits of pounding on someone else's lion to be let out.

He scrambled up and over the last stretch of ramp as Red started to lower it. He hit the ground hard, stumbled through a few steps, and let his momentum steady him as he charged forward, shrieking Hunk's name.

Hunk met him halfway, catching him up in what had to be one of the top three hugs in all of intergalactic history. Lance wheezed through a laugh, too ecstatic to care that he couldn't draw in a full breath, and squeezed Hunk back, screaming in his ear. (Screaming was okay by Hunk--if it bothered him, Lance would have found that out a _long_ time ago.)

"Holy crud, man," Lance said, head spinning as Hunk set him back on his feet. "It's been _way_ too long." Shay ventured forward, and offered her own hug, and she gave Hunk a run for his money. Okay, so she wasn't as exuberant as him, and she wasn't as soft, but she'd obviously picked up a thing or two hanging out with Hunk.

"It is good to see you again," Shay said. "And I am happy you were able to come."

"Like I'd miss this." Lance straightened up, planting his hands on his hips. "I'd have fought the entire freaking planet if that's what it took."

Hunk let out a soft squeal and pulled Lance in for another hug, then suddenly pulled back. "Hey, hold on a sec. Are you taller than when you left?"

Lance shot a look toward Keith, who had finally emerged from the lion, only to be immediately ambushed by Akira, who seemed, at the moment, to be trying to give Keith a noogie--and was braving teeth, claws, and sword to do so. Lance grinned. "A little, yeah. Thace keeps telling me that gravity's a lot weaker on the homeworld so I'm gonna lose some of this, blah, blah, blah. Pretty sure some of it's the real deal, though, cause Keith's barely grown at all. Or maybe that's just because he's spent his entire life on space ships, I dunno." He leaned in, whispering behind his hand. "Either way, he’s pissy about it, cause now he can't pretend we're the same height."

Hunk laughed, but Lance spotted a flash of blue and yellow around his shoulder and screeched. "NYMA!"

He charged toward her, and she paled, backing away. He leaped at her and she cursed--but she caught him nonetheless, and he beamed as she scowled down at him.

"Hey," he said. "Long time no see."

Rolling her eyes, Nyma let go, and Lance barely managed to avoid landing on his tailbone. (Which wasn't to say he avoided falling all together, but at least it didn't hurt. Much.) "Okay, I'd forgotten how exhausting you are," she said. "Good fucking luck, Coran."

Lance's jaw dropped, and he scrambled to his feet. "That's _right_! Where is he? Coran!" He spun a full circle, but Coran hadn't made it down here yet, and Lance couldn't stop himself from pouting. He'd been waiting to pounce on Coran from the moment he'd felt that little tug in his soul--especially when, the next time Lance called, Coran had dodged the topic like a championship laser tag match for a solid five minutes before sheepishly admitting what had happened.

He could sense the bond more clearly now. It was the warmth he'd felt when he heard Coran's voice on the comms, only brighter, and it pulled him deeper into the castle. He felt Blue's joy, too, and smiled as she slipped back into his head.

It had definitely been too long.

" _Arel?_ "

Zuza let out a delighted laugh, and Lance turned just in time to see her descend on Arel, lifting him off his feet in a hug. He flailed, pawing at her arms like a cat that didn't want to be held, but she was easily fifty pounds heavier than him, and she hardly noticed his protests.

Lance's eyes darted to Keith, who had drawn closer to Akira, giving his former classmates a sidelong look. Akira's lips pulled down in a frown, and he shifted in a way that placed him between Keith and Arel, though Lance couldn't tell if that was intentional or not. (Curiously, Shiro was nowhere to be seen, and concern plucked at Lance's center as he scanned the room. He knew Pidge and Ryner were off on a mission right now, and no one had been able to reach Val's group since Keith's little astral plane jaunt the other day. But Shiro should have been here to greet them.)

"Zuzroka...?" Arel said when she finally put him down. "What--? How are--?"

"Keith," Zuza said brightly. "You've probably heard by now, but he defected, right? Told the Empire to eat a sentry and joined the paladins, then came to Revinor to bust us all out. He do the same thing with you or something?"

Arel gaped at her, his jaw flapping, and Lance couldn't help but grin at his utter bafflement. (Served him right, though, always assuming the worst about Keith.)

Lance turned to see if Keith had been watching the exchange, only to find him halfway out the door already, Akira hot on his heels.

"Hey." Lance touched Hunk's arm and jerked his head toward the door. "I'm gonna go check on Keith and say hi to some people. Catch you at dinner, maybe hang out after if you're not doing anything?"

"You got it, man," Hunk said, tapping his fist against Lance's.

Lance grinned, then hurried after Keith and Akira, his gut twisting. The trip out here had been tense, to say the least, even if it hadn't actually come to a head. Lance had been riding high on anticipation, so it barely bothered him at all, but it wasn’t like he hadn’t noticed the friction between Keith and Arel. Thace had nearly had to step in when they reached the Red Lion and Arel made a show of calling Mirek to let her know he hadn’t died yet.

It kinda sucked that they had to put up with him for the Unity. Kinda _really_ sucked—though given Zuza’s initial reaction, Lance thought he might be able to rope her into running interference, at least for tomorrow. And, hey, maybe spending all that time with a fellow drop-out who actually did trust Keith would be good for him.

Lance wasn’t holding his breath on that one.

"It's nothing," Keith was saying, his arms crossed tight over his chest. "Forget about it."

Akira leaned back, eyeing Keith. "You sure about that? I don't need to punch him, you know. I can be sneaky, too."

"We talking about Arel?" Lance asked, sauntering up to the other two. "Cause I know it would probably cause more problems, but for what it's worth, I'm on team punch him."

Akira grinned, and even Keith cracked a smile at that, though he only lifted his head a fraction. "It's _fine_ ," he said. "I just needed to get away for a second. He didn't stop watching me the entire trip, and I think if I'd stayed, _I_ would've punched him."

"Now hold on," Lance said. "We can't all be on team punch him. Because then someone is actually gonna punch him, and that's going to be an issue down the road."

"Not if it's me it won't," Akira said. "He can hate me all he wants; I don't mind."

Lance crossed his arms. "Hang on just a second now. It sounds like you two are forcing me to be the responsible one here, and I never agreed to that! You're the oldest. Shouldn't you be the one telling us to behave?"

Akira lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "Eh. Wouldn't want to encroach on Takashi's turf. Besides. If anyone gets to wreak mayhem with Keith while Matt's gone, it should be me."

"What?" Lance squawked. "Why? I'm his boyfriend!"

"And I'm his adjunct."

Lance opened his mouth to respond, but he flickered through too many moods over the course of the next three seconds to string words together. He was indignant, first and foremost, because _hello_ , he and Keith made a great team, thank you very much. Indignation quickly gave way to resignation, though, because Akira did have a point. Adjuncts had a special place kind of by default. Then the confusion crept in, and the doubt.

"Wait... did I miss something?" Lance's eyes darted from Akira, who still wore his smug little grin, to Keith, who was just nodding along like Akira declaring himself adjunct was the most natural thing in the world. Lance turned back to Akira. "Since when are you an adjunct?"

"Since--" Akira paused, the smile falling from his face. "Since... Uh..." He looked at Keith, who only shrugged, seemingly unconcerned. "I don't know. It's--I wasn't really thinking about it; it just sort of... came out."

Keith rolled his head to the side, carefully avoiding looking at either of the others. "I mean... _I'm_ not complaining."

"I'm not either!" Lance cried.

But Akira was already waving his hands. "No, you're right, Lance. I can't just up and declare myself an adjunct. That's not how it works."

"Sounds like a challenge to me." Keith spun around and stalked back toward the hangar, looking for all the world like he was ready to fight his lion on this.

"There's no need for that, Keith," Karen said, appearing in the doorway with Coran. "Akira was right. He is your adjunct."

Akira’s spine went rigid, eyes wide as he stared at her. "I am?"

She sighed, looking skyward like she couldn't believe she'd saddled herself with this particular group. "Yes," she said. "Red formalized the bond as soon as she came through the wormhole, though if I'm not mistaken, she's had her eyes on you from the start."

Akira blinked, color creeping into his cheeks, and he ducked his head like he might catch a glimpse of Red through the open door. "Seriously?"

"Trust her on this one," Coran said, clapping Akira on the shoulder. "Knowledge is her domain, and she's wrong less and less often these days."

"Her... domain?" Lance asked.

Karen nodded. "Coran and I have been delving into the records, and into our bonds. It seems each of the lions, and by extension each of the paladins, can be distinguished by the roles they play and the way their bonds express themselves. There’s the elemental component, obviously, and your function within the team--Black is the head of Voltron and the leader of the team; Blue and Yellow, as the legs, are your support." She waved a hand. "All that influences the paladins, but for the most part, it doesn’t carry over to the adjunct bond. Think of it this way: if the paladin bond is a braided cord, the adjunct bond is a single strand--what we’ve been calling the domain. A particular strength the lions specialize in. Something they seek out, and something they amplify with their bonds. Our bond is weaker than what you paladins have, yes, but in some ways more concentrated because of that."

Lance nodded thoughtfully. "So then what _are_ these domains?"

"Knowledge for Green, as Coran said." She gestured to him, then to Akira. "Blue's domain is emotion, and Red's is instinct. I'm not certain of the other two--I seem to only know things when they become relevant to me, and neither Black nor Yellow has formally chosen an adjunct yet."

"Instinct, huh?" Akira scratched his chin. "I like the sound of that."

Karen lifted both hands to massage her temples. "I definitely do not."

He grinned, throwing an arm around her shoulders. "Hey, come on. It'll be just like back on Earth. You plan for everything, I rush in and almost get myself shot!"

"That's _precisely_ what I'm worried about."

Lance smiled as Akira continued to rib Karen, Keith smiling into his hand from a few feet away. They were right, Lance decided. Something about Akira and Keith and Matt just clicked. And, hey, as long as Keith was smiling like that, nothing else mattered.

Well...

Lance's eyes drifted toward the empty corridor, Shiro's absence tugging at him once more. He glanced back at Akira, who had a protective arm around Keith and seemed to be threatening to run off to the homeworld after Hunk and Shay's Unity, arguing that, if instinct was his domain, shouldn't he go with his gut on this? It occurred to Lance that if anyone knew where Shiro was, it would be Akira, but something told him that it wouldn't be a pleasant conversation, considering Zarkon's recent attack and how shaky Shiro had seemed afterwards.

Lance didn’t need to go ruining the mood. Leaving Akira to distract the others with absurd plans to come at Zarkon head-on with guns blazing, Lance slipped away, keeping his steps light until the voices and the laughter faded behind him. Only then did he slow, his smile fading as a sympathetic ache settled in.

"Okay," he murmured. "Now if I were a Shiro, where would I be...?"

* * *

Wyn was sore today. Not in a bad way, necessarily; just enough to be annoying. Rowan had pushed himself a little too far on the training deck yesterday was all. He was getting good with a staff--just, sometimes he forgot that he wasn't the only one who had to use this body.

Rowan was dead tired today, too, so it was just Wyn. Tired, sore, and bored out of his mind.

For a while he wandered in search of Maka, who was always good for a distraction. They'd made some good progress on the scanner they were building. They'd even picked up what Maka thought was a rebel broadcast the other day, though it was too fuzzy for Wyn to make anything out. They were close, though, and if they found anything, Wyn could tell Rowan about it when he woke up.

But Maka wasn't in his room, or in the common room the refugees from Revinor had taken over. He was probably off playing with Dagmar or Bee or one of the other kids who had moved to the castle-ship over the course of the last few months. There wasn't a lot to do that didn't involve getting in someone's way (or getting recruited for chores), so the kids all banded together to play whenever they could. And it wasn't like Wyn wasn't allowed to join in; Maka had even invited him a couple of times.

Wyn supposed he was just too jumpy around groups. He preferred hanging out with one or two people at a time, or else with the adults, who mostly ignored him.

Restless and now a little disappointed, Wyn headed for the elevator. Didn't matter where Maka was; Coran was always happy to have Wyn around, whether they were working together on something, or whether Coran was teaching Wyn about one of the many things he seemed to be an expert on, or whether they just sat and talked about anything. Rowan had even started participating in those discussions sometimes, when they turned toward either supremely practical matters or towards deeply philosophical ones. Personally, Wyn found the latter to be dull and dry, but Rowan enjoying Coran's company was better than Rowan constantly watching for signs that someone was about to turn on them, so Wyn would take it.

Coran wasn't on the bridge for once, but Zelka pointed Wyn toward the star map chamber that Coran liked so much. Coran had even taken Wyn there a few times, and since it was something Wyn and Rowan enjoyed equally, they'd made several return trips alone. Wyn's feet carried him there almost automatically while his mind spiraled down on tweaks he could make to the scanner next time Maka was free. He'd been helping Coran with the castle's main transmitter, and he was beginning to get a better understanding of how it all worked.

"Well, they wouldn't be much of a spy if you knew what they were--"

The voice cut off as soon as Wyn opened the door to the star map chamber, and Wyn froze, wishing he could just close the door and have not been noticed. It was no good, of course. The light from the hallway overwhelmed the dim lights of the star map, so there was no chance of Wyn's intrusion going unnoticed by either of the men within.

"Ah, Wyn!" Coran called, beaming. "How are you, my boy? You remember Thace."

Wyn nodded, shuffling his feet. "You're Keith's uncle."

Keith's uncle, the former spy.

Wyn hadn't realized he was back on the castle-ship, and the fact that that probably meant Lance was back, too, didn't do much to drive out the dread as the significance of Thace's words hit him. They were talking about the spy on the castle-ship--a subject that always made Wyn feel shaky when it came up.

He was more than shaky now. He felt sick to his stomach, and he squirmed under Thace's steady gaze. Wyn couldn't explain why the subject made him so uncomfortable. Maybe because no one ever talked about it, like if they all pretended it didn't exist, then it couldn't hurt them. Maybe because a spy here meant that Wyn hadn't escaped Haggar at all, and even if he couldn't remember all of what happened back then, he still knew he didn't want to go back.

Maybe this sickening fear didn't have a reason at all. Maybe he just didn't like to think about things that were so full of uncertainty.

Thankfully, Coran changed topic quickly, telling Wyn all about the system he had pulled up on the map. Wyn did his best to listen, but it was hard with Thace standing behind him, silent and watchful.

He wondered what Thace saw when he looked at him.

* * *

Lance wandered for a while, stopping by the training deck and Shiro's room before the answer hit him. When it did, he felt like an idiot. Regular old training, or prepping for a mission, or--what, sleeping? None of that would keep Shiro from welcoming Keith home, and there obviously wasn't a castle-wide emergency ongoing.

Which meant that it had to be something with Black. If the confrontation with Zarkon had rattled Red enough that Keith had to go see her for an entire day before he could focus on anything else, Lance had to assume Black was worse. And he already had plenty of evidence that time could get away from you on the astral plane. Shiro had probably intended to be done an hour ago so he could join the welcoming committee in the hangar, and he didn't realize he'd missed that deadline.

Though, if that were the case, the problems probably ran deeper than Shiro wanted to let on. Either he'd been putting this off since the battle, or he'd been trying to address the issue and still hadn't resolved it, and either way it made Lance's throat close up. Couldn't the guy ever catch a break?

Lance hesitated there in the middle of the hallway for another few seconds, wondering whether this was really the sort of thing he had any right to get involved in. Probably not, right? Black's trauma was a private thing, never mind Shiro's. Lance doubted either of them would appreciate an intrusion.

But at the same time, just because Shiro didn't want to bother anyone else with his pain didn't mean that he didn't _need_ someone to offer him a little bit of support.

Squaring his shoulders, Lance headed down to the Black Lion's hangar. He might as well see how they were doing and ask if he could help. If the answer was no, then he could leave, no harm done. Probably. He hoped.

He hesitated again in the door to the hangar, staring up at Black. She sat tall, her particle barrier glowing a soft violet, her eyes dark and everything about her quiet. Lance considered turning right around and walking out of there, but he hesitated, wetting his lips as he considered Black. It was always hard to tell if the lions were resting but still watchful or if they were well and truly distracted, but Lance's skin tingled in a way that made him think Black was watching him.

"Hey," he called, his voice small in the massive open space. "I was just looking for Shiro... He in there with you?"

Black gave no response, of course, and Lance shuffled from foot to foot, wishing he'd changed out of his armor before coming down here, if only so he'd have pockets to shove his hands into.

"I, uh... Just wanted to see how he's doing. I know you both have had a rough time of it lately." Lance scratched his neck, looking anywhere but at Black. "It's okay if he's not up for talking, though. Just, uh, just thought I'd check. Is he--is he here? Can he hear me? Or can you, like, pass the message along or whatever?"

He waited for a few more seconds, and when Black didn't move, he turned, pointing awkwardly at the door.

"Got it. I'll just be going, then? Sorry to bother you."

He made it two steps before Black's shield fizzled out, the electronic hum of it loud in the silence. Lance froze, then turned as Black lowered her head and opened her mouth. Shiro smiled, rubbing the back of his neck self-consciously. He was dressed more casually than Lance had probably ever seen him, in a simple pair of sweat pants and a loose-fitting gray tee.

"Hey," Shiro said. "Sorry I wasn't there when you guys got in. Guess I lost track of time."

Lance whipped around, waving his hands. "What? Naw, you don't need to apologize for that. I just came cause I know the whole thing with Zarkon hit Red pretty hard. Figured it'd be worse on you and Black." He paused, searching Shiro's face for signs of what he might be thinking. "Everything okay?"

"Yeah," Shiro said. He had that look on his face that said he was trying to be strong for the team again--that had to be pure reflex at this point--but after a moment, he grimaced. "It's getting there."

Lance tried not to gape, but--well, Shiro admitting to being anything less than stellar wasn't exactly a common occurrence. He shook himself, ignoring his shock. "Yeah?"

Shiro nodded. "Black and I are working through it. I guess it took longer than I realized."

"Doesn't it always?" Lance chuckled, and Shiro fell into step beside him, headed back toward the main elevator that would take them up to the paladin quarters. "It's okay, though. You can take all the time you need to get your head on right. None of us is gonna fault you for that."

Shiro glanced over at him, a curious look on his face. After a moment, his lips quirked upward. "I know. And that means a lot to me."

"Hey, that's what family's for." Lance smiled, and once they entered the elevator, he tucked his hands behind his back, rocking back onto his heels as the floors ticked by. "You know... you should find Keith when you get a chance."

"I was planning on it." Shiro narrowed his eyes. "Why? Is something wrong?"

"Nope." Lance rocked up onto his toes, grinning. "But he has something to tell you. Him and Akira."

"Him and--" Shiro cut off with a groan. "Oh, god. What did they do this time?"

Lance only laughed and shook his head. "I should let them tell you. But it's good, I promise. Well--good, but also probably dangerous."

Shiro blew out a long breath. "As if I don't have enough gray hairs already."

Lance swallowed a laugh--but Shiro was smirking as the elevator doors opened and he headed out into the hallway. Lance chased after him. "You know..."

"Yeah?"

Lance wrinkled his nose. "No, never mind."

Shiro turned, arching an eyebrow. After a moment, he turned back around and disappeared into his room. Lance lingered in the hallway, back against the wall.

"Seriously," Shiro called. "What were you going to say?"

Lance flushed. "Nothing, just... I ran across some, like, Altean bleach in one of the store rooms? Apparently white hair was really fashionable on Altea or something. Cause of the royal family, you know? Anyway, that's what Coran said..."

Lance trailed off, and for a moment the only sound was Shiro moving around in his room. A drawer slid open, then clicked shut, and fabric rustled as Shiro changed. When he emerged a moment later in his usual crisp black shirt and vest, he was smirking.

"Are you suggesting I bleach my hair to prank my brothers?"

Lance rolled his neck, staring pointedly at the far wall. "No? I mean--y'know--"

"Because if you are," Shiro went on, "I'm in."

He slapped Lance's back as he passed, leaving Lance to gape at his retreating back as he walked away. Lance fumbled for words, just trying to wrap his head around the idea of _Shiro_ pulling a prank, and it was a few seconds before he remembered how to walk. Once he did, he chased after Shiro.

"Are you serious?" Lance cried. "Don't joke with me, Shiro. I don't think my heart could take the disappointment."

Shiro laughed. "I'm serious. We'll have to see how well it works, but if Keith and Akira get up to as much trouble together as I know they're capable of? I need something in my back pocket that isn't a lecture, because god knows Akira won't listen."

Lance pumped a fist in the air, his head already sprinting ahead with plans. "You got it. I'll grab some of the bleach tonight and we can test it out. Then I'm thinking start small--"

"And see how long it takes them to notice?" Shiro guessed. "Slowly expand this streak until they catch on?"

Lance kept himself from screaming in delight, but only barely. "Exactly! Oh my god, this is going to be the best. I can't wait."

"You know what?" Shiro asked, shaking his head as a grin pulled at his eyes. "Neither can I."

* * *

As it turned out, Keith and Akira had not, in fact, burned down the castle by the time Shiro and Lance found them. They had, however, decided to try sparring with Akira blindfolded, a la Luke Skywalker's early lightsaber training. They were using training swords, at least, which Lance was going to go ahead and credit to Karen, but Shiro still nearly turned around and walked out of the room.

"I thought you were Han Solo," Shiro called, leaning against the wall. Akira cocked his head to the side, and Keith got in a cheap shot that left Akira cursing as he dropped his sword, shook out his reddened knuckles, and pulled off his blindfold to glare at Keith. (Keith, for his part, looked positively impish.)

"Han is Force-sensitive, too, I'll remind you," Akira said, sucking on his knuckle. "There's no reason he couldn't do the same thing."

"Yeah, and how well is the Force working out for you?"

Akira wrinkled his nose.

"Right." Shiro clapped Akira on the shoulder, then strode past him to wrap Keith in a hug that almost muffled his muttered, "Don't let him corrupt you, Keith, I'm begging you."

Lance laughed, but the matching grins Keith and Akira wore were far from comforting, and Lance made a mental note to track down that Altean bleach as soon as possible. He had a feeling Shiro was going to need it.

* * *

Lance was waiting in the hangar half an hour before the ship from New Altea was set to arrive. Hunk was there with his moms and Lance's, obviously, and Lance had convinced Keith to come, too. Lance had had to play up how disappointed Luz would be if he wasn't there to get him to agree, but the truth was Keith wanted to be here. He wasn't ready to admit that he was part of the family, but his smile didn't lie, and right now his smile said he was almost as excited to see Lance's family as Lance was.

Almost.

"How much longer?" Lance called, flopping onto the comms panel where he'd left open a connection to the bridge. (It was easier than calling back every five minutes, and Coran didn't seem to mind.)

"Any moment now, I'm sure," Coran said with a chuckle. It took Lance a moment to remember that Coran would be feeling this restless excitement, too, because--right. Adjunct bond. It was pretty cool and pretty useful and just a little weird, and he kept forgetting it existed. "Ah. There we go. Their wormhole just opened up. Give them a few ticks to get in position, and then they'll be coming your way."

Lance whooped, standing up straight. "They're here!" he called, bouncing on his toes.

The last two minutes of waiting felt as long as the entire rest of the morning, but then, finally, the ship came into sight. It was a compact little cruiser, only about the size of a yacht. Considering how much room the engines, shields, and weapons took up, Lance imagined it would have been a little cramped for seven people--seven people plus a pilot or two who knew the controls for a ship like this.

Luz and Mateo were the first off the ship, Lance's dad calling for them to slow down as they sprinted across the hangar. Luz gave Lance only a fleeting hug before throwing herself at Keith with enough force to stagger him. Mateo did the same with Lance, his forehead smacking against Lance's chin.

"Hey," Lance complained, giving his brother a noogie. "Watch that thick head of yours, would ya?"

Mateo laughed, not letting go, and Lance marveled at how tall he'd gotten. His mom had said Mateo had hit his growth spurt--him and Luz both. Mateo looked more like a teen now (maybe because he _was_ a teen now, which made Lance feel old) and Luz was more the gangly figure Lance expected of Mateo than the energetic little munchkin Lance remembered.

God, when had they grown up?

Lance's parents shared quick kiss before Mateo went to tackle his mom--they were the same height now, which was bizarre--and Lance's dad came to give him a hug. "Doing good out there?"

"You know it," Lance said, letting his dad fold him against his chest as the waterworks kicked in. "Missed you, though."

Lance's dad smiled into his hair, squeezing him a little tighter. "Missed you, too."

"Luz, baby, you're too tall to be climbing on people still."

Lance didn't even have to lift his head to picture Luz climbing Keith like a twisty playground slide, and his tears yielded to a giggle fit. He probably should have tried to smother it, but he didn't, and he heard the snarl in Keith's breath that meant the laughter hadn't gone unnoticed. He'd probably pay for that later, but he couldn't help it. He turned, grinning as a dejected Luz backed away as Lance's mom straightened her shirt, smoothed her hair, and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

"Told you," Lance said, sidling up to Keith, who shook his head but leaned his shoulder against Lance's.

"Yeah, yeah. I guess I missed her, too."

Lance didn't have time to go on teasing Keith, because Sebastian and his parents were waiting just behind Mateo, and Lance charged over to give them all a hug. Eli had already been swallowed by the Kahale family celebration, though it was anyone's guess who was more overwhelmed: Hunk and Shay, who were the sole focus of Eli's bottled enthusiasm, or Eli himself, who seemed to have been roped into the last-minute preparations for the Unity, with both Hunk's moms piling on more tasks every time Lance turned around.

The only dark spot in all of this was Sebastian, who hugged Lance and his mom as enthusiastically as anyone but faded soon after, dropping out of the conversation and staring back at the ship that had brought them. He seemed more than just distracted, but Lance couldn't say what was bothering him. Something about the three-day trip to the edge of the defensive zone? Or maybe something had happened back on New Altea. Lance wondered if he should try talking to Sebastian about it later, maybe if Lance caught him alone.

It would have to be after the Unity, though, because Lance had already promised Hunk distractions between now and the ceremony, and Lance couldn't shirk that responsibility. Unities didn't have actual best men, apparently, but Lance still intended to fill that role in spirit.

Tomorrow, then. Lance nodded, then swooped in to save Hunk from his uncle's curiosity, and the two of them ran off in search of Pidge, who had agreed to put together an engineering smorgasbord that would keep Hunk happy for at least a couple of hours.

* * *

The Balmera was cozier than Sebastian had expected when his uncle said they were going visit some alien caves. It wasn't damp or dark down here--far from it. The crystals embedded in the walls seemed to recognize his presence, so even when he wandered away from the laughter and cheerful singing in the more populous caves, he always had enough light to see by.

It was warm, too, surprisingly so. He'd ditched his jacket within the first hour, and by now he'd rolled his sleeves up, too. He followed the sounds of voices from cave to cave, too intrigued by the architecture of the place to care that he was getting hopelessly lost. Back on Earth, caves always felt a little haphazard, like any structure might crumble away with the slightest push, but not so here. It looked like these chambers had formed with the Balmeran occupants in mind--not carved out of the stone, but grown just so. It felt more like a manicured garden than anything, and that alone was more alien than anything he'd seen on New Altea.

It was a little bittersweet, being somewhere so foreign: he was humbled by the awareness that he was seeing what only a handful of other humans had the privilege of seeing, but at the same time he was terrified at the reminder of just how big the universe was.

Mostly, though, he was impressed by the history contained in these tunnels. Grown, carved, or shaped by alien magic, it made no difference--it must have taken years to make these twisting passages. Generations, even, if they really did criss-cross through the entire planet. It felt like stepping into ancient ruins, except this place was perfectly preserved, shielded from the elements by hundreds of feet of stone.

A new set of voices picked up ahead of him, and his steps slowed. He'd wandered off in part because he didn't want to be around people today. Or rather, he couldn't help feeling that they wouldn't want to be around him, once they realized what sort of mood he was in. Everyone else was ecstatic, buzzing with energy as they flitted around making last minute preparations for the ceremony tonight and the party that followed. They didn't need Sebastian bringing them down.

Nevertheless, he found himself drawn forward by the voices ahead. They weren't as jubilant as the ones he'd left behind, which may have been why he didn't immediately turn away, and when he'd made it a few steps closer, he began to make out words.

"No, no, no. _Pax_. It was Den the Navigator who started the last Migration. Den the Elder lived whole generations earlier, and he oversaw the Unity of Rexa and Klem."

"And Rexa and Klem were..."

"The caretakers of the Nursery?" the first voice said, sounding impatient. "They who saw a full _five_ Balmera hatchlings breach their first crystal in their lifetimes?"

The second voice hummed. "Right. Apologies, this is much to remember."

Sebastian poked his head around the corner into a long, low room. Crystals dotted the floor, two Balmerans seated beside each. Unlike most of the crystals in this place, these ones didn't give off a steady glow. Rather it shifted like a fiber optic display, cycling through cool tones that pulsed in a way that reminded Sebastian of breathing.

The voices he'd heard seemed to belong to the pair nearest him, though there were four other pairs ranged around the room, each talking in low voices. The first pair looked up as Sebastian entered, and he cringed.

"Uh, sorry. Hope I'm not interrupting anything."

One of the Balmerans, the one Sebastian pegged as the older of the two based on their hunched shoulders and the cane leaning against their crossed legs, cocked their head to the side as though trying to decide what to make of Sebastian. The other, who was sprawled on their back, only waved their hands in the air.

"Do not fret. The only thing you are interrupting is my own ineptitude, and that is a welcome distraction indeed." The Balmeran sat up, smiling at Sebastian. "You are human. Does that mean you are of the paladins' circle?"

"Uh... my sister and my cousin are two of the blue paladins, yeah." Sebastian scratched his cheek. "I guess I do stick out here, don't I?"

The younger Balmeran smiled. "A bit, yes. _Avunt_. Sit with us a while. I am Chal, a Keeper in training."

"Sebastian," he said, sitting cross-legged beside the fire. "What's a Keeper?"

"One who keeps the stories of our ancestors," the older Balmeran said. "Chal has much passion for the art, but she has had little experience. The Galra were not kind to the Keepers of Theros. We on Metos fared better in this regard."

"Quen has agreed to train me," Chal said, beaming. "His knowledge of our people's history is vast, and I am honored to learn that which we have lost... But I would welcome a break."

She smiled at Quen, who shook his head. "We are in no rush here. A short break will do no harm."

Chal nodded, her head swiveling back toward Sebastian. "I have not had the opportunity to speak with many of the paladins. Only Shay's promised heart-mate, and that only in passing. What are they like?"

"The paladins?" Sebastian asked. "I don't know, they're just regular people, I guess. Regular people who got thrown into this war and decided that they wanted to make things better."

Chal leaned forward. "That seems like a wonderful story to keep. Perhaps I will add it to the song."

"Once you have finished your training," Quen said pointedly, "perhaps you will."

Chal wrinkled her nose. "I know I still have much to learn. You need not remind me of it so often." She flashed Sebastian an apologetic smile. "Apologies. Perhaps I should get back to my studies. We could speak this evening after the Unity, if you are free?"

"Sure..." Sebastian said. He shifted to stand, but hesitated as he noted the return of his apathy. It had retreated for a moment as he sat here, and he found himself loathe to return to his aimless wanderings. "Acutally... Would it be okay if I stayed a while and listened? I won't be a distraction, I promise. Or--are these the kind of stories that you don't tell outsiders? Because I get it if they are. I just--"

"They are not," Quen said. "We have a very few sacred songs that we do not share, and we have kept our histories from the Galra since our captivity began, but that was only to safeguard them against eradication. We seek now to share our stories. With our own people first, yes, but also with any friends who would listen."

Sebastian settled back in, sitting up straight and attentive as Quen slid back into his stories. It was like a song, Sebastian realized. Or like a chant. It was like listening to a ballad or to epic poetry as it was meant to be told, and Sebastian was captivated. He sat and listened to story after story until another Balmeran came to tell him his family was looking for him.

* * *

The day passed in a blur. Hunk hardly sat still for a moment, constantly rushing from one task to another. After tinkering with Pidge and Lance for most of the morning, he tried one last time to give more form to his vows, because even if Shay said the words weren't important, they were to Hunk, and he wanted them to be perfect. Before he'd done more than scribbled down and subsequently scratch out a few trite phrases, it was time to get started on lunch, so he found his mama and headed down to the kitchen, where the familiar work at least kept his heart rate down for an hour or two.

Lunch itself was plenty full of distractions, too, as Keith and Akira stumbled in late, sweaty and covered in some kind of white powder. Lance elbowed Shiro, and they shared a meaningful grin before going stone-faced under threat of Akira's scrutiny.

"Are we sure we're ready for this?" Hunk asked as he and Shay got ready in her room. Well, _got ready._ Pssh. There wasn't really much to do. Shay had told Hunk he could wear whatever, but her dad had made her a new tunic--a cheery yellow garment with white accents that hung to her calves--and when he'd offered to do the same for Hunk, Hunk hadn't been able to say no. (He had, however, opted to wear pants under it.)

Everyone else was already gathered in the heart of the Balmera--everyone from the castle-ship, all of Shay's circle, the other Elders, and a few scattered friends from across the Balmera. Hunk and Shay could go down there whenever they were ready.

Shay took his hands in her own and smiled. "Be at peace, Hunk," she said. And dang it, she really was surprisingly calm about all this, which wasn't fair at all. "This is for us. There is no one we need to impress. No one to judge us and say we did not fulfill the requirements of the Unity. We are enough as we are; we need only go and declare our intent."

"And afterwards?" Hunk asked. "What if I'm supposed to do something and I don't realize that's part of the Unity? Maybe we should have waited longer so I could study more. Why can't there be a technical manual for this kind of thing? How to Declare Unity in A Hundred and One Easy Steps."

Shay laughed again, not unkindly. "This is not a test to be passed, Hunk. You chose me, and I chose you. We are who we are, and our Unity is what we already have. I need no more than that. Do you?"

He blinked at her, his stomach settling. "No," he said.  "I like what we have."

"Then let us be on our way. I do not wish to delay any longer than we must."

Hunk didn't either, if he was being honest, so even though his heart was still hammering in his chest, he let Shay pull him out of the room and down the quiet tunnels to the central chamber. She'd walked him through the ceremony five times over the last two days, though there wasn't much to remember. There was a little more pomp to this Unity than the other one Hunk had witnessed, Shay being an Elder and all, but that basically meant they had to sit through some speeches from the other Elders first. Then they'd give their vows and press their hands to the Balmera's core crystal and...

Something.

No one seemed to be able to explain it. Hunk suspected it was a Balmeran thing, because Shay seemed to have a pretty good idea of what they were meant to do. He'd gleaned a little from her when they'd flown Yellow back to the castle yesterday, but it was all vague images and impulses. She assured him he'd know what to do when they got there, and if he didn't, she'd help him.

That was the part that had Hunk worried. Nothing like declaring Unity, then standing there awkwardly for ten minutes while you tried to work out the kinks.

Before he knew it, they were at the door of the inner chamber, and Shay reached out to straighten his tunic, beaming at him. "Well...?"

He offered her a weak smile in return. "Here we go."

Every eye turned toward them as they entered, and Hunk felt his knees go weak. Okay, so he'd known there would be dozens of people here, sure. But knowing it intellectually and actually seeing it were two completely different things. It didn't matter that he knew most of them personally. He'd been helping out with the circle more and more lately, and he knew everyone here was happy for him and Shay.

They were still watching him.

Shay squeezed Hunk's hand, pulling him toward the central crystal. There was a spring in her step, and in case it wasn't apparent before, this definitely wasn't a wedding ceremony. There was none of the usual stuffiness, none of the formality. No one cared that they were practically sprinting down the aisle, or that Lance stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled at Hunk as he passed.

Hunk whipped around to glare at him, but that proved to be a mistake. Lance's face was already streaked with tears, despite his wide grin, and Hunk's moms weren't much better off. Hunk felt his own eyes brim with tears as he hastily faced forward once more.

Shay intertwined their fingers, smiling at him, then bowing to the other Elders as Hunk's lip began to quiver.

"Elder Shay," Elder Rua said. "You come to declare Unity."

"I do," Shay said.

"And who is it you bring?"

"Hunk Kahale of Earth, my chosen heart-mate."

They spoke the words aloud, though as Hunk understood it, the ceremony was usually carried out entirely in the song. Special circumstances, he supposed. Though, at least he wasn't the only one in the room who needed the spoken words. Still, the song hovered just on the edge of understanding, and as the Elders talked on about the duty of an Elder and the special place Shay's heart-mate would fill within the circle, Hunk found himself listening more and more to the song, and less and less to the words.

It was strange, but he swore he could hear it a little more clearly than usual. The gathered Balmerans were all crouched to touch the floor or else standing at the edges of the room, within reach of the walls, and Hunk wished he was, as well, because he suspected he might have been able to hear a little better if he were.

Suddenly the other Elders were withdrawing into the crowd, and Hunk's stomach gave a lurch as he realized they'd finished the first half of the ceremony. And of course Hunk had heard none of it.

Shay turned toward him, and Hunk straightened up, shoving aside thoughts of his upcoming vows and the paranoid part of his brain that kept insisting someone was going to quiz him on the Elders' speeches after this was through. Now wasn't the time to get distracted.

"Hunk," Shay said, her eyes watering already--and she hadn't even started yet. Hunk sniffled, muttering a curse. He'd just chased away his misty eyes, too. "Thank you."

Hunk blinked, her simple words quieting his mind better than any of his own attempts.

She smiled, taking his hands. "When first we met, I was a youngling who knew nothing of the universe. I railed against the Empire, but I knew not how to fight back. Then you came, and you showed me what it meant to take a stand. I was glad when you returned and the chance arose for me to aid you and yours, but even then I never dreamed I might be a paladin of Voltron, much less the Elder of my circle. It has not always been an easy path that brought us here, but through it all, you have never left my side. You taught me to be strong, and you reminded me to be kind, and even now, every day, you remind me that I am more than I thought possible."

Her voice faltered, and she leaned forward, pressing her forehead to his.

"It means more than you could know," she went on, voice so soft even Hunk could barely hear it. She seemed to want to say more, but she just shook her head, humming a song Hunk didn't need to hear in perfect clarity to recognize. He heard it every time they flew Yellow: affection, trust, joy. Love. "I offer you myself, for you are already one with me."

She squeezed his hand, and Hunk's voice faltered. Now was the part where he was supposed to speak, and all his half-formed vows scattered as he reached for them, blinking away tears that fell too fast for him to catch.

"Shay." His voice broke on the word, and he laughed, releasing her hand for a moment to wipe his cheek. As he did so, he turned his head just enough to spot his friends in the crowd. Nyma held Lance at arm's length, so he'd latched onto Pidge instead, squeezing them like a teddy bear until their face turned red.

Hunk chuckled, sniffed once more, and met Shay's eyes.

"It's kinda funny that you said I taught you to be strong, because when I first came here, I had no idea what I was doing, and I was scared out of my mind. But I saw you standing up for your people, even with the odds stacked against you, and I--I think I knew even then that you were one of those people who really mattered. I didn't know if I'd ever see you again, but I kept thinking about you. Thinking about how brave you were, how you risked everything to help me because you couldn't stand to watch injustice happening right in front of you.

"And then I saw you again, and you came along with us, and then Yellow chose you, and you know what I thought? I thought, 'Of course! Who else could she pick?' Which, maybe that was a weird thing to think, because you never wanted to fight. But being a paladin is about so much more than that. You helped me remember that, when the war got bad and I kept forgetting about what we're really doing. Helping people. Reuniting families. All of that, Shay, you help me see the good we're doing, because sometimes all I can see is the danger."

He swallowed, his heart racing to try to condense everything he felt into these vows, even as his throat closed up.

"I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't know who I'd be without you. You're my best friend, you're my inspiration, you're the reason I believe in myself, because I never imagined I'd be out here doing _this_. You--" He laughed again, suddenly self-conscious. "It's like you said. You're one with me, and I don't need to give you my heart, because you already have it, but I'll give it to you again if you want it. I'll give it to you a hundred times over, Shay. Whatever you want, it's yours."

She was crying too, now, and Hunk stopped himself before he descended into incoherent sobs--not that he wasn't already there. He didn't know if anyone had understood the last of what he'd said, between the sniffles and the quake in his voice.

He'd meant it, though, and it seemed like Shay understood that. That was all that really mattered.

Without a word, they turned toward the heart crystal and pressed their hands to it, Shay's atop Hunk's. Her hand was incredibly warm, the crystal equally so, and for a moment Hunk swore he heard Shay's heart beating in time with his own, the crystal pulsing to the same rhythm.

The song swelled around them, and he felt something tugging at him. Shay or the Balmera, or maybe whatever magic existed at the center of the Unity ceremony--Hunk didn't know, but he yielded to it just the same, reaching out with something nameless inside of him as Shay did the same.

Their souls, their hearts, their Quintessence, whatever it was, it twined together, thoughts brushing up against one another like they did when they were in Yellow. It wasn't so explicit a bond, but it was every bit as intimate, and this time when Shay sang joy it resonated inside Hunk, awakening something deep in his core.

Suddenly the Balmera song washed through him in all its glory, a hundred voices--more--weaving together in harmonies too complex to follow. Hunk lost himself for a moment in that music, following countless threads down to the very root. One sang of awe, another pure elation for the two who had been joined. There were other melodies, too, ones that had nothing to do with the Unity, and if Hunk stretched, he could follow those, too.

Shay's song was closer than any of them, and it snapped him out of his trance. He blinked, focusing on Shay's face as she lifted a hand to his forehead, singing concern as she brushed his hair aside. He responded in kind without a thought, singing comforting melodies that felt familiar, though he'd never heard them so clearly before.

Shay froze, her eyes going wide, and it hit them both at the same moment.

He was hearing the Balmera song. Really hearing it, the way it was meant to be heard.

Hunk's heart swelled, and Shay's face burst alight with a smile so wide Hunk swore he could actually feel it warming him from within. He squeezed her hand and then, because that wasn't nearly enough, he pulled her closer, pressing their foreheads together and wrapping his arms around her.

Heart-mates.

He'd never imagined anything could feel so _right_.


	27. Generations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time: Allura, Matt, Val, and Edi are on Oriande, where they had a run-in with Matt-from-the-future and several of the others. The two groups' guides separated them quickly, but not before past!Matt figured out that Akira is the red adjunct and future!Matt let slip that he hadn't come to Oriande because something happens to Shiro. The encounter was strange, but it gave Allura an idea: her parents are here somewhere in the city. If she can find them, she may be able to pass along a warning.
> 
> Meanwhile, Pidge and Ryner have traced Sam Holt to a prison on Renxora. They did some recon, but put the infiltration on hold until after Hunk and Shay's Unity. Now they're going to see what they can learn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warnings for this chapter: the main one is a scene where a character gets glimpses of alternate realities where major character death occurs (on screen but brief). You can avoid this by skipping the scene that begins, "A thousand worlds..."
> 
> Less intense but more pervasive throughout the chapter are discussions of death including mass murder, medical horror/experimentation, and generally just high levels of stress and emotional turmoil.

The Museum of Royals.

Allura almost had to laugh at the fact that Aneta thought coming here would help. In another lifetime, or if she'd come here as a child with her parents, perhaps she would have been fascinated by the history laid out before her: holograms narrating the lives of Altean royals, a handful of artifacts (most of them recreations), and panels on the walls showing scenes from the lives of the subject of each room. Val in particular was impressed by these walls, and she pressed Aneta until the woman admitted that it was a magic peculiar to Oriande. The panels functioned like windows into specific moments in history. This wasn't an estimation of what these peoples' lives had been like; they were actually watching history unfold.

The early rooms didn't have such windows, of course. Aneta explained that the windows could only be opened to moments that fell within the scope of Oriande's existence. Queen Antora and the other monarchs who had been present at the Hythan Accords came first, and then their children, and then Antora's grandchildren and the lines of their descendants who had maintained influential positions in Altean government over the centuries.

Queen Aniva was the first to have a window into her life. Aniva was Allura's great-grandmother, who had remained on Altea after her daughter Queen Revalia took the Castle of Lions to the skies, and had died before Allura was born. Allura's parents had told her stories of Queen Aniva, the Architect of the Lions. But it was one thing to hear lectures on how Aniva and the sages had conferred on the Lions' construction, how they had theorized about what would come of their project, yet had still been surprised at the degree of autonomy the Lions possessed.

It was something else entirely to witness Aniva's first encounter with the Black Lion.

Allura's restless, burning need to find her parents quieted somewhat in Aniva's room, though it returned in full force as they moved on. So much of what she was seeing here was new to her, a tangible reminder of what Zarkon had stolen. Altea could have been so much more than this. So many lives cut short. So much culture and technology ripped away, lost even to the people of New Altea.

When they at last reached her father's chamber, Allura stopped in the door, feeling as though she'd been punched in the gut. A hologram appeared automatically, narrating Alfor's childhood on Altea--how he'd met Coran, how he'd been a bane to the castle staff, how he'd been there for the launch of the Castle of Lions under command of his mother, Queen Revalia. On the far side of the room stood another door. Like all the others, it bore a name in gilded runes--the full formal name of the subject of the upcoming display, tracing their lineage all the way back to Queen Antora. Above the runes in larger letters was a shortened version of the formal name.

In this case, Allura's own: Allura Alfor Revalia Antora.

It felt strange to know she had her own chamber in this museum, and she wondered what it showed. She didn't think for an instant that Aneta would actually let her set foot inside the next room (which was honestly something of a relief, as it meant they were finally done with this place and all the turmoil it had stirred up.)

More than her own room, Allura had to wonder what lay beyond. Would Allura have children after the war? Would the royal line continue in some fashion? Or had New Altea outgrown that need, making Allura's room the last in the museum.

Allura felt sick at the thought. She couldn't bear to look over at the window into Alfor's life, for fear that the sight of him, alive and exuberant, might shatter her completely. (And if it did, she asked herself? If she couldn't bear to look at him _here_ , how did she expect to speak to him if she ran into him on the streets of Oriande?)

And then, of course, were the darker thoughts. The fears that her father wasn't all she'd once thought him to be. The doubts left behind by his behavior near the end of his life, and by the fact that he'd erased his memory profile rather than leave it for Allura to consult after his death. Might she find the answers in this room?

Her chest grew tight, darkness closing in around the edges of her vision. No. Her father was a _good_ man, and a good king. Perhaps he had made mistakes in his life. Perhaps he was ashamed of some of them. But he was her father. If his shortcomings were laid bare in this room, then she wanted nothing to do with it.

She scanned the room, ignoring her friends' concerned gazes and the comforting hand Matt reached out toward her. There in the corner was a plain, unmarked door. An exit, she hoped. She hurried toward it, bile rising in her throat, and pushed through into blessed fresh air and the not-quite-sunlight of Oriande's sky.

Aneta hovered nearby, chewing on a thumbnail. "Perhaps we should have stopped before that last room," she murmured. "My apologies, your Highness."

Allura screwed her eyes shut, wrenching away from the hand that landed on her shoulder. "It's fine," she said. Her voice shook, and she turned away before anyone commented on her emotional state.

 _Find Father,_ she told herself. _Forget about the rest. Just find him, and make this right._

"Are there any libraries in the city?" Allura asked, praying she sounded like someone searching for a distraction, and not an opportunity. "Or perhaps art displays?" Either one would attract Sa's attention, and in a place like this, Sa very likely would be the one dictating the group's movements until they made it to the temple and asked their Questions.

"The Lakeside District," Aneta said. Her voice was soft, and her face, when Allura forced herself to look, screamed sympathy. Allura felt a twinge of guilt at that, but she couldn't let it stop her. Her family was counting on her. "There are a couple of exhibits in the area, a number of fountains and statues on the streets. Most of the cities libraries are restricted-access or incredibly nuanced--but there are a couple of theaters over in Lakeside, if you're interested?"

Allura nodded, and Aneta bounded away, launching into more lectures that were probably meant to cheer Allura up, or at least distract her. Instead, Allura ignored every word, scouring the crowd for signs of her father and his team. It was a hopeless mission, and Allura knew it, but she refused to give up. She rushed them through exhibits they visited, declined the play Aneta tried to push them toward, and then, when they passed a gem-encrusted fountain that shot water a hundred feet in the air and Allura thought she'd spotted Keturah in the crowd, she slipped away.

She listened intently for shouts that would indicate that Aneta had noticed her absence, but all she heard was her pulse pounding in her ear and her own shallow breathing. She twisted through the crowd, hissing apologies to those she bumped into, and skirted the fountain. Mist cooled her face, soothing her flushed cheeks, and she wiped the moisture away with her sleeve as she neared the place she thought she'd seen Keturah.  
  
There was no one here.

No one she knew, at any rate, and the disappointment nearly crushed her as, at last, she heard Aneta's shouts rise above the chatter of the crowd. Allura didn't try to run, or hide. The day was more than half gone already, and Allura was no closer to finding her family now than she had been this morning. Perhaps it was a fool's errand. Perhaps she shouldn't have let herself dream.

Aneta burst out of the crowd, Matt, Val, and Edi following behind. Aneta was poised on the edge of anger, but it faltered when she saw that Allura was alone and not stirring up any trouble.

"You--you should try to stick closer, Princess," Aneta mumbled. "It's easy to get lost in these crowds. Risky, too. We wouldn't want you to wander into a restricted area by mistake."

Allura managed a smile. "Of course," she said. "I'll be more careful."

They moved on, leaving behind the crowds of the fountain plaza and entering a quiet boulevard with statues and arches lining both sides. A shout of delight broke the hush, and Allura's blood ran ice cold.

"Pick up the pace, Zarkon, or we’re going to leave you behind!"

Matt, Val, and Edi all stiffened at the sound of Zarkon's name, but Allura had gone numb, turning mechanically toward the voice--just in time to see her father come bounding into view, his eyes bright with excitement, his hair tied back in a ponytail Allura hadn't seen for decades before his death. He turned back the way he'd come and paused, brilliant smile dimming, and then glanced Allura's way, as though sensing her attention on him.

Their eyes locked, and for all Allura had been hoping for this, she found she wasn’t prepared to come face to face with her father.

She wasn’t prepared in the slightest.

* * *

Renxora made Pidge sick, and they hadn't even set foot inside its airlock.

Their dad had been here. Maybe was still here. They couldn’t be sure yet, but this place was so remote, so… _cold_ , in more sense than one, that their stomach turned at the thought of their father being stuck in here for even a few weeks.

The fact that he’d come here well before Voltron’s return and therefore had probably long since been transferred away didn’t do much to make them feel better about it.

They'd spent the last few days going over the information they'd managed to gather over the course of two recon missions--first to the system the coordinates led them to, just to locate the damn base, then a few days later to actually scope the place out. From the outside, it didn't look like much. A tiny little bunker stuck onto a barren asteroid. Pidge had suspected right from the start that the Empire had converted the interior of the asteroid into the actual prison, and they were right.

But they very much doubted Renxora was a simple prison. Nothing about it was simple. It couldn’t be. Not with how hidden it was, not with the fact that Pidge’s dad had been sent here. Not with the handful of structures they’d identified already that made Pidge’s thoughts list toward robeasts—massive hangars and hallways, reinforced walls, odd Quintessence readings, when they got readings at all.

"Are you sure you're ready for this?" Ryner asked. "The last thing we want to do is rush into this."

"I'm ready," Pidge said, mentally testing the cloak's status as they brought Green in toward the base. "Beyond ready, actually. If I'd had my way, we would have done this yesterday."

Ryner said nothing to that, but Pidge felt her disappointment in the bond, along with her disbelief, and they relented. Okay, so they wouldn't have missed Hunk and Shay's Unity for anything short of rock-solid proof that they'd found their dad, and that was one thing they didn't have. That didn't mean that part of them wished Hunk and Shay had waited just an extra day or two--just until after this mission. Just so Pidge didn't spend half the day obsessing over access codes and points of entry while they acted as a kind of pack mule for tissues for all their leaky friends.

"I'm not rushing this," they said, more subdued than before. "We've learned everything we can from the air, and you and I have both checked over all our findings twice." As had Coran, and Shiro, and Nyma, and even Hunk once, when he'd been especially desperate for distractions.

They were ready.

Ryner finally nodded and let Pidge settle Green on a little ridge just outside the bunker. The top levels were all administrative areas, with the prisoner cells and research labs, presumably, hidden deep below the surface. Of more particular interest to Pidge at the moment were the hangars. There were three of them, one many times larger than the other two, the doors all camouflaged to blend into the terrain. Pidge and Ryner's target was one of the smaller hangars, which they'd pegged as a dock for supply ships and the like--and if this place was anything like normal, it would see supply ships twice a month or less.

Once Green was settled in, Pidge stood, shuffling their feet as Ryner laid a hand on the console, silently asking Green to keep an eye out while they were inside. The skies should remain clear, but Pidge supposed a little insurance couldn't hurt anything.

They kept silent as they sealed their helmet and headed outside, Ryner following behind. The original plan had called for a Guard squad to accompany them--maybe only half a squad, since stealth was the main concern here. Unfortunately, Akira and his pilots were already overworked--a few ships damaged in Zarkon's attack and a whole lot more out patrolling allied territory and visiting friendly worlds to continue reconstruction efforts. The peacemaking game was more important now than ever, and Pidge would be the first to admit that.

Besides, the goal for today was _not_ to engage. Whatever this asteroid was made of, it messed with Green's scans, and Pidge had only been able to patch together a hazy view of the lower levels. The administrative area had the highest concentration of bio-signatures, and the sentries were sure to be scattered throughout, and they’d detected some amount of Quintessence from the lower levels, but beyond that Pidge had no clue what they were getting into.

That didn't stop their mind conjuring up parallels to the lab on Vel-17, which only made them queasy as they pictured their dad getting subjected to those same horrors.

(They knew--they _knew_ odds were he hadn't escaped the experimentation. He was human in an empire that had very quickly discovered just how valuable human test subjects were, and Pidge couldn't imagine Haggar would ignore that. They just... hadn't wanted to have to face the possibility quite so soon.)

With a deep breath to steady themself, Pidge crouched beside the nearest edge of the hangar door, trusting their scans more than their eyes for this task. Rover bobbed along at their shoulder, and once they'd uncovered the maintenance hatch that contained the emergency override, he plugged in.

For a moment, all was still. Then Rover beeped, and the doors slid apart by a couple feet--just wide enough for Pidge and Ryner to drop through, firing their jets to slow their fall before they hit the floor thirty feet below. Rover gave the command for the doors to close again and slipped through as they did, rejoining Pidge below. The hangar, as they'd hoped, was empty aside from a few shuttles that would barely make it off the asteroid and a pair of sentries that marched forward to investigate the disturbance.

Ryner shot them both through the chest before they could raise their rifles.

"All clear," Pidge said, jogging forward as they fell. They helped Ryner drag the sentries to one of the shuttles, tucking them inside and out of sight of the cameras or any other patrols that might pass through. That done, they pulled up the scanners in their armor. "We're still too high up to get a good view of the lowest levels, but it looks like most of the guards are upstairs. Must be the middle of the night-cycle."

Ryner hummed, not putting away her pistol as they moved on. "Perhaps. There may still be guards waiting for us below."

Pidge nodded. "Then let's be quick, and more importantly--let's be quiet. Come on, Rover. I'm gonna need you to jack into the cameras for me."

* * *

Allura stared at her father, drinking in the sight of him, at once captivated by the sheer exuberance he exuded and sickened by the knowledge that outside of this place, he was already long dead. He stood there staring at her like he was trying to place her, and Allura didn't know if she was hoping he would recognize her or that he would just walk away. She wanted to warn him of what was coming. She thought she might be sick if she had to talk to him.

"No," he breathed, such wonder in his voice that it nearly cut Allura's knees out from under her. She heard Val's muttered curse, felt Matt shift closer like he was afraid he was going to have to catch her. She noticed these things, but they flitted in and out of her conscious mind as her father took a step toward her. "Allura?" He gave a disbelieving little laugh. "Is that you? Lealle! Zarkon! Come here!"

And, oh, she was going to be sick, because that was her mother, radiant even in the shapeless gowns of Oriande, a few strands of hair escaping from her cap, her indulgent expression morphing into one of delight as she caught sight of Allura.

Lealle raced forward, catching Allura up in a hug that left them both staggering, tears pressing at Allura's eyes as her mother's laugh rang in her ear and Allura locked eyes with her mother's killer across the plaza.

If Allura's parents were noticeably younger than they'd been at the end of their life, then Zarkon was downright youthful. Allura had almost forgotten what he looked like as a young man--stiff and stoic and heaving a sigh as Alfor took him by the shoulders and swung him around. Allura scrambled to remember how long ago it was that they'd come here. Not long after Zarkon and Sa had been chosen by their respective lions--Allura remembered Coran presenting it as a team bonding exercise. That would have been, what? Forty years before it all went wrong. So long...

Zarkon smiled at her, surprised and delighted, and Allura could only imagine what he saw when he looked at her. She would have been a hundred and ten or so where they'd come from--no longer a child, but still a long way from adulthood, no older in his eyes than Pidge was now.

And they'd been close. Back then, they had been. He'd been on the castle-ship for nearly a decade, alternately babysitting her and yielding to her as she learned to command, and the Allura he knew would have run to him and tackled him in a hug if they'd happened across each other here.

Allura couldn't do that. Even knowing this was before Zarkon had betrayed them, even knowing at this point he'd still had the Black Lion's trust and respect--even so, she couldn't look at him and see anything less than the man who would slaughter trillions in his quest for power.

She felt Aneta’s eyes on her, along with those of her team, and of her parents, and she wished they would all just disappear for a moment so she could think. Riala and Rhoal had been very clear that one could not change the past here, nor seek to divine the future. And yet Matt had done just that—twice. He’d clued them into Akira’s station as red adjunct, and then directly stated that Shiro was alive and well in his time. True, these things were small compared to stopping the very formation of the Galra Empire, but they proved that the laws of Oriande were not absolute. Allura could stop this. She could save _so many_ people.

She opened her mouth, her words carefully chosen--

And in an instant, she found herself elsewhere, the city replaced with endless white. She seemed to be standing inside a cloud, the air hazy in all directions, the white around her not quite featureless. In the distance, she saw whorls and currents in the mist, but at close range nothing had any substance whatsoever, and it left her feeling off-kilter, her eyes struggling to focus.

"What happened?" she demanded, turning around. She was surprised not to find Aneta there, or one of the other stewards of Oriande. This place felt somehow more oppressive considering she was alone, and she swallowed against a lump in her throat, casting her gaze toward the sky. "Why have you brought me here? I haven't done anything wrong!"

Silence answered her, and the tips of her ears burned.

"I didn't even say anything," she added, sullen. That was the point, she supposed. It would do them no good to whisk people away only after they'd blurted out sensitive information. However the sages identified those near-misses, in practice it was very much a premonition.

She crossed her arms, glowering at a shape in the mist she imagined to be a person. All right, so she hadn't been subtle enough. That was fine. She could do better. Probably best not to start off with, 'Your best friend's going to murder you in a few decades, how's your trip?'

"I'm sorry," she said, pumping every bit of remorse she had into the words. "You're right. I can't change the past. I was just--it was a shock, seeing them. I wasn't thinking straight. But I'm fine now. You can send me back."

She wasn't sure who she was speaking to, but there must have been someone there--or whatever magic was to blame for this odd seclusion had granted it the ability to respond to the people trapped within--for just a few seconds after Allura spoke, the white clouds winked out of existence. For a moment, Allura seemed to be between the white nothingness and the Oriande she'd been in before that. She thought both spaces were Oriande, in a sense, and the place she was now perhaps even more so. Oriande with the magic stripped away. Not an undying city removed from time, not an unshaped space meant to absorb rampant emotion.

Only space. Oriande had once been a location in the physical universe--a fertile moon, if the legends were to be believed. The sages had taken it away, but it still had ties to that place, and Allura saw it now: a quiet, empty stretch of void not far from a sad red star. The moon was there, and then it wasn't, and then the star was brighter and yellower, and then even that was gone.

* * *

"So who are you folks?" Lealle asked, bouncing on her toes. She’d seemed disappointed when Allura vanished, but she recovered quickly—or at least covered her disappointment far better than the others. "Friends of Allura's? New Guardsmen? New trainees?" She stopped, eyes going wide. "Ooh! Are you two paladins? Is that why Allura brought you here? Where's the rest of your team? Which lions do you pilot?"

Matt's mouth ran dry, and not only because Lealle's questions were hammering at some very delicate topics. The simple fact that she was here talking to him was enough to set him on edge. Her. Lealle. Allura's mom and former blue paladin. The woman who had chosen Zarkon over her own husband, who had subsequently been murdered by Zarkon himself.

If Matt had thought facing Allura was hard, he was sorely mistaken. Facing Allura was nothing. Facing Lealle without demanding answers she probably didn't even have yet was soaking up all of Matt's self-control. He glanced at Val and at Aneta, hoping one of them would step in to deflect before he went and ruined everything.

Keturah was faster, casting her eyes skyward as she stepped forward and let a hand drop onto Lealle's shoulder. "Lealle. _Please_. Stop badgering them. You know they can't answer any of those questions anyway."

"Hm? Oh. Right." Lealle flushed, rubbing the back of her neck, and flashed Matt a smile. "Sorry about that. I got a little excited."

"It's fine," he said, proud of himself for forcing the words out at all. He couldn't make himself say much more than that, and he envied Edi, who had ducked behind Val, hiding her face in Val's robes--probably because of Zarkon, if Matt had to guess, which--Yeah. Matt kinda wished he could do that, too.

Sa gave Keturah a look. "Oh come on. Don't try to pretend you're not just as curious as the rest of us."

Keturah sniffed, a faint pink tinging her pale cheeks. "Of course I'm curious. I'm also painfully aware that _some of you_ \--" She glared at Alfor, and then at Zarkon-- "spent the entire hike out to that tower lecturing me about impulse control and respecting the laws of Oriande."

Alfor grinned, slapping Keturah on the back, while Zarkon managed to look abashed, scratching at his cheek and avoiding Keturah's glare.

"The Lady Paladin is right," the other group's guide said. "Perhaps it would be for the best if we were to move on. We still have much to see--assuming you meant it when you said you wanted to see everything."

"Of course we want to see everything!" Alfor said, all energy once more. He spun around, gesturing at the city, then took his guide by the shoulders. "There's so much to see here! Oriande--the city of infinite wonders! But--come on Katrona. At least let us wait until my daughter gets back."

The guide, Katrona, rubbed the bridge of her nose. "Your Majesty, think about this for a moment. You're going to see her again in a few hours. She's _already_ seen you after you made it home. Time has very little meaning here except in that it limits how much you will be able to see and do here before you must leave."

"I know, I know. Lealle--" Alfor turned, holding out a hand toward her, and she smiled, crossing to her husband.

"It's tradition," she said, patting Alfor's cheek. "You don't leave without saying goodbye, no matter what. The life of a paladin can be unpredictable, you know."

Matt stiffened, turning slightly and catching Val's eye. She looked as close to tears as him, and he tore his eyes away before they crossed the line and got whisked away like Allura. Because he knew all too well that neither of Allura's parents had said goodbye the last time they parted ways. Lealle had left in secret to track down Zarkon, and Alfor had placed Allura in stasis without even telling her what he intended.

Well, Matt certainly wouldn't be the one to rob Allura of _this_ farewell.

"Well, hey," Val said, a barely perceptible wobble in her voice. "We can't say anything about us, sure, but you guys aren't going to spoil anything for us. So--hi. I'm Val. I haven't heard much about this visit of yours. What brings you to Oriande?"

As smooth transitions went, it wasn't much, but Matt had to hand it to her for being able to think on her feet at all, considering his mind was one long, endless cycle of Zarkon-the-bastard, that's-Allura's-dad, and there's-Lealle-she-doesn't-look-like-a-traitor, intermingled with the occasional glance at Keturah. He wondered how much she'd known about Red that Matt and Keith were still trying to figure out. God, there was so much he wanted to ask these people, even aside from the obvious.

He felt eyes on the side of his head and turned to find Keturah watching him, her expression curious. If he focused, he could almost sense her on the other end of the bond, the way he could sense Keith, the way he'd nearly sensed the future versions of himself and Keith. He wondered if Keturah could sense it too, and if she had any idea what it meant. She wouldn't have ever known what it was like to have a second paladin bonded to her lion.

Maybe--just maybe--he could still talk to her. Not tell her anything about what was coming, not drop any hints, just... talk. One pilgrim to another. If she really could sense what he was, maybe she'd be willing to open up.

It was worth a shot, and if it failed, then, hey. At least he'd find out whether or not they'd whisk him away to the same place they'd taken Allura.

* * *

Rolo didn't sleep well. He hadn't since they'd given him the new leg. They'd grafted it to his bone, wired him up with synthetic nerves that he supposed were meant to make the leg move more naturally but which, in practice, only made everything hurt more. It was too heavy, and every little movement dragged at his lingering wounds.

Thank the cosmos for Rax, though. He'd continued his daily Quintessence treatments, always with his head down like he was embarrassed at what he was doing, always retreating to the far corner afterwards like he had to keep up the illusion that he didn't care about Rolo. (And yet he always came back an hour or two later to check on the wound and to ask Rolo to rate his pain.)

And the pain was getting better. He hadn't felt that white-hot agony since the first day, except once a few days later when the druids had come in with a guard squad and hauled Rolo to his feet. The instant he put pressure on the cybernetic leg, every nerve lit up with fire. He didn't remember if he'd screamed, or if there had been more to their little test. He was pretty sure his legs had just given out right off the bat and they'd called it a day, but the whole exchange was a blur of pain in his mind.

At least they'd decided to give him a few more days to recover. He wished it could last forever. Because, sure, the agony was gone, but the aches remained. Dull aches, sometimes throbbing with his pulse, sometimes rolling through him in slower waves. It all made sleep hard to come by, so Rolo had spent much of the last few days in an exhausted stupor, stealing rest when he could and letting his cellmates distract him from the pain whenever they were awake.

He'd woken early today, as usual--early by the schedule they kept in the cell, which he knew drifted. He and Sam checked the clocks around the base from time to time, if only to keep track of how many days they'd been here and to delineate the times when they might be taken from the times when the rest of the prison was dark and they could be relatively certain they would have a few hours of reprieve.

It was harder to separate from himself when the pain was a constant, but Rolo had gotten good at it. His infrequent excursions, with Sam or alone, were the only break he got from the unending malaise, and he seized them in both hands, even knowing he wouldn't be able to maintain his focus for long.

The clock at the end of the hall said it was still a few hours before dawn, or whatever arbitrary marker corresponded to the start of a new day out here. Rolo roved a little farther, delaying his inevitable return to his body and testing his limits. He was almost back up to his usual range, but his stamina was still sorely lacking; he already felt the tug of his body and the bone-deep fatigue waiting for him. But, _vrekt,_ maybe if he pushed himself a little, that fatigue would be enough to win out over the pain. He needed a few more hours of sleep.

He always needed a few more hours of sleep.

He passed the guard station, reminding himself again that he owed Rax his life--bad as this was, it could have been much worse. His leg could have gotten infected. He could be dying a slow and painful death right now, knowing all the while that Sam and Rax would suffer the punishment for failing to save him.

Rolo started to move on, clinging to his focus to squeeze just a few more minutes out of this walk, when a door opened and then slammed shut. He stopped, turning back toward the guard station, and his heart dropped. Druids. Two of them, with eight guards flanking them.

That was never a good sign, but even less so this early in the morning. The druids should have been asleep now, and Rolo wasn't sure he wanted to find out what was important enough to drag two of them out of bed and down to the holding cells.

He released his projection and slammed back into his body, the force of his return startling Sam awake. He reached down at once, squeezing Rolo's shoulders and murmuring reassurances, but Rolo grabbed his wrists to stop him before he made it far into that script.

"Druids," he whispered. "Two of them. They're headed this way."

Sam froze, all traces of sleep vanishing from his eyes. He sat up, reaching for Rax, who lay on his other side just barely within arm's reach. "Shh. Trouble."

Rax screwed his eyes shut for a moment, but despite the rude awakening and the warning in Sam's voice, he looked only resigned as he roused himself, scooted closer, and reached out to rest a hand on Rolo's thigh. Familiar warmth spread through Rolo's leg, soothing the strongest aches.

There wasn't time for more as footsteps rang out in the corridor, approaching rapidly. Rolo managed a weak smile for Rax before pulling himself upright with Sam's help, his cybernetic leg stretched out before him, his head already spinning from this little exertion. Sam steadied him, and Rolo could tell he was searching for something to say to reassure him that everything was going to work out.

Rolo had to laugh at that, though the sound took a sharp turn toward a sob as the lock turned and the druids stepped in. The shorter of the two stood back, hands crackling with black energy--a warning that required no words. Rolo kept his head down as the guards filed into the room, two of them grabbing Sam while the others closed in around him, warding off Rax and Rolo--as though they might fight back, Rolo too injured to even stand and Rax long since beaten into submission by whatever prison or colony he'd come from.

"I'm coming, I'm coming," Sam grumbled, just a hint of defiance in his voice. Even that made Rolo's heart clench. "Isn't it a little early for labwork? And such a big entourage, too."

One of the guards slapped Sam, winning a pained grunt as Sam stumbled forward, but the druid in front only chuckled, her clawed hand reaching out to grasp Sam's chin.

"My, you've got a tongue on you today," she whispered. "Perhaps we've been neglecting you too much this past week. You're right, though--today is no ordinary day." She twisted Sam's face up to look at her, a line of blood running down from where one of her claws had broken the skin. "You should be honored, little human. Today is the day we make history--and you get to be a part of it."

* * *

Allura blinked, and she was back in the plaza beside her father, who cursed and caught her as she stumbled. Her stomach clenched, but she beat back the urge to grab him by the collar and tell him everything he needed to know to stay safe.

"Careful, sweetie," he said, wrapping an arm around her. Her mouth ran dry, but a weak, childish corner of her mind suddenly roared to life, and she sank into the embrace before she could remind herself of all the reasons why indulging in this reunion was a bad idea. "Are you okay, Allura? What was that?"

"Nothing." She pulled back far enough to smile at him, though she made no effort to break his embrace, and she laughed to distract from the tears gathering in her eyes. "It doesn't matter. I forgot myself for a moment is all--What about you? I've been trying to remember when it was you took this trip."

"Zarkon just bonded the Black Lion," Lealle said, looping an arm around Zarkon's neck and pulling him against her side. He struggled against her hold, his expression one of indulgence, and even that turned flat as she put her hand on his cheek and smushed his face against her own. "Look how happy he is to be here."

Matt coughed, flushing as Allura gave him a sharp look, and she tried her hardest not to acknowledge the awkwardness radiating from her companions. It was hard enough to face her father and his paladins without her friends' pity chipping away at her resolve.

"I am honored," Zarkon said, finally ducking Lealle's arm and straightening his robe. He gave her a wary look as she hovered nearby, but she held up her hands in surrender, and he sighed, returning his gaze to Allura and her father. "I _am_. I know how few live to see this place in person."

Lealle rolled her eyes, hands on her hips. "You could stand to be a little more excited about it, there, Zarkon. This is _Oriande_!"

"And I'm very much looking forward to our meeting with the sages," he promised. "It's all this wandering around that's boring me."

"Wandering a--" Sa's feathers lifted off his neck as he stalked forward, jabbing a finger into Zarkon's chest. "Do you even _realize_ where you're standing?"

Sa was the smallest of this team, Zarkon easily the tallest (though Rukka gave him a run for his money in stockiness), and Allura remembered laughing when she saw them together, Sa always excitable, always in motion, always chattering away. He used to swarm all over Zarkon, who would just shake his head and smile--as he did now, raising a hand to cover his laugh as Sa launched into a rant about the history and culture of Oriande and how today was their one day to soak it all in.

"What are the odds we get another chance at this, Zarkon?" Sa demanded. "Come on! Enjoy yourself! There's no reason to go rushing on to the temple right away."

Sa's words ran Allura through, and she shivered, her insides turning to ice at the reminder that, no, this team would never again return to Oriande. A few short decades, and they'd all have fallen apart, most of them dead or dying and Zarkon alone left standing at the dawn of an apocalypse of his own design.

She caught her mother's eyes across the loose ring of paladins and poured all her pain and regret into her expression. Lealle stilled, and Allura willed her to discern the problem. To notice even just that something was wrong. Surely that wasn't too much to ask; Lealle had always been perceptive, and once she uncovered a problem, she rarely let it go. Allura could work with that, dropping hints that her mother, alert as she was, would catch, but which might slip by the guides unnoticed.

Blessedly, Lealle noticed Allura's distress at once and went still, her eyes riveted to Allura, questions unasked in the air between them. Allura drew in a breath and flicked her eyes toward Zarkon.

She found herself back in the white emptiness with her next heartbeat and scarcely stopped herself from screaming aloud. "Again?" she demanded.

The mist coalesced in front of her, taking on a bipedal form with glowing yellow eyes. "We know you are hurting," the figure said, its voice skittering around her like a hundred people speaking as one. "But you must desist. No good can come from meddling with events long past."

Something inside Allura cracked at that, and she revised her instinctive decision to play innocent for the judges. "No good?" she seethed, stalking toward the figure of white. " _No good_ can come of stopping Zarkon--you can't be serious. Perhaps word hasn't reached you here in your pleasant little haven, but Zarkon has ravaged the universe. Ten thousand years of his bloody reign--countess people dead, countless worlds, countless cultures--how can you stand there and say that no good can come of stopping that?"

"We do not expect you to understand the delicate balance we strike here in Oriande." The figure's posture didn't change, but its voices did--no one voice altering its tone, but rather the more cheerful voices fading so the ones that came through were snappish and disdainful. "Our duty is to the universe first, and we will not sacrifice it to soothe your conscience."

"I'm not--"

Allura's voice faltered as the figure scattered. It wasn't just a visual departure, either; the very air felt lighter with the figure gone, like Allura had been standing inside a pressurized airlock for too long and the sudden change when she finally emerged left her lightheaded and sick to her stomach.

"Wait!" she called, knowing the figure was still watching her. "You can't just say something like that and then walk away! You say you have a duty to the universe--then why won't you let me save it?"

Something moved in the clouds up ahead, and Allura stalked toward it, her pounding heart driving her faster and faster until she was running through the void, her vision swirling as her eyes struggled to find something to latch onto. She pressed onward, clinging to her anger.

"How many people have to die needlessly before you realize that the past isn't always worth preserving?" she said, her voice rising in volume until it rang in the air around her, echoed back at her like a cruel mockery. "You claim you have the universe's best interest at heart, but that's a lie! If you cared, you would stop Zarkon. If you cared, you would save all the people he's killed."

Her voice cracked, and she stumbled to a stop, suddenly aware of the sheer scale of this place. She could run forever, it seemed, and nothing would have changed. She'd still be stuck here, alone in the nothingness with her own words flung back in her face, and nothing she said or did mattered.

"Let me save them!" she cried, spinning around. Her breath began to come in strained gasps, her pulse pounding in her temples. "Please... If there's nothing I can do, then why even let me see them? If there's nothing I can do, then just take me to the sages and be _done_ with it! I can't go back and face them again, knowing the man they're smiling and laughing with is going to murder them, and that I can't even say goodbye without you ripping me away. It's not _fair_!"

_**Life isn't fair, young one.** _

Allura froze--not a conscious decision so much as an instinctual response to the presence that had suddenly joined her. She stood rigid, her breath stagnating as the newcomer prowled around her. She sensed it out there in the mists; she almost thought she could see it. But it kept its distance, and she never spotted more than a hazy shadow.

It turned, then, fixing her with eyes that blazed as white as the clouds around it, yet somehow even purer.

_**The sages are bound to guard the universe. It was the promise required to cloak Oriande in this veil. They must preserve the foundations of history--the good along with the bad. To do otherwise would be to jeopardize existence itself.** _

“No,” Allura said. “ _No._ I don’t believe you. I don’t believe that there’s _nothing_ you can do. If you only tried—if you’d seen the things I’ve seen--”

 _**The things you have seen, young one?** _ The presence laughed. It wasn’t a cruel laugh, only a tired one, but it stopped Allura’s words in her throat all the same. _**Come. Let me show you some of what I have seen. We shall see if you still believe this risk to be worthwhile.** _

Allura opened her mouth, defiance ready on her tongue, but the whiteness all around burned more brightly than ever, and it all burned away—the void, the presence, and even Allura herself.

* * *

"All right," Aneta said, tugging at a lock of pastel hair. "I don't think waiting for Allura is doing any of us any good. Maybe... we should go explore the rest of the city?"

"I'm not going anywhere without Allura," Matt said, hopping up onto a planter near Keturah. It put him uncomfortably close to Zarkon, which wasn't ideal, but Matt thought he was doing a pretty good job of playing it cool, all things considered. Katrona was still insisting that Alfor's group go, and had gotten into a little bit of an argument with Alfor himself. Apparently Allura got her stubbornness from him, and if Matt had to wager, he'd say the king would come out on top of this fight.

Aneta, on the other hand, looked like she wanted to _avoid_ a confrontation, so though she looked crestfallen at Matt's response, she didn't argue.

A glance at Val said she was on Matt's side, sidling up to Sa and striking up a conversation about the historical significance of Oriande and whether there was anything Sa recommended they see before they left. As distractions went, it wasn't bad--Sa started talking a mile a minute, the same way Pidge got when the subject of computers or robots came up, and Matt felt a pang of grief for the paladins he'd never got a chance to know.

It was so different seeing them here, alive. He'd talked to the holograms dozens of times, but it had never really sunk in that they'd died. That what he was talking to was just an echo.

He'd never imagined Sa looking so young--hardly older than Matt himself.

"So."

Matt gave a start as Keturah joined him, her eyes carefully fixed on Alfor, who seemed to be trying to get Zarkon to join the discussion with Katrona. Zarkon was clearly irritated, but he looked to be near to giving in, which wasn't something Matt thought he'd ever see.

Matt turned back to Keturah. She wore the same enveloping cloak as everyone else, but she managed to make it look like a ball gown with some trick of her posture or her gliding gait. With the hood pulled up and her face turned away from him, he couldn't see much of her expression, but she still somehow gave off the impression of a court lady using her fan to give subtle signals to her friends and rivals.

It was... bizarre, to say the least. Matt could see his friends reflected in the other paladins--in Sa's enthusiasm and curiosity, in Rukka's nervous attempts to break up the increasingly heated argument between Alfor and Katrona, in Lealle's charming smiles and infectious laugh. He hated to admit it, but he could even see in Zarkon the same inscrutability Shiro and Allura adopted when they wanted people to view them as the heads of Voltron.

But Keturah? Matt couldn't honestly see what it was that had sparked Red's interest. She was poised, watchful, and reserved. The team liked to joke about how reckless Matt and Keith were, how they ran on gut instinct and never stopped to think things through--and, sure, that wasn't always true, but Red did bring out that side of them. They were a wildfire: untamed and restless.

And Keturah was... none of that.

"So..." Matt said, once it became clear that Keturah wasn't going to lead this conversation. "You're the red paladin."

"From your tone, I assume you come from a point after I have stepped down from that role."

Matt cringed, looking around to see if one of the guides was going to come yell at him. But Aneta had retreated with Edi to a bench at the edge of the plaza, the both of them looking like they wanted nothing more than to fast forward to the end of this encounter, and Alfor had one arm around Katrona's shoulder, gesturing broadly with the other as he talked about... the weather? Matt frowned.

"I'm not sure how much I should say," Matt admitted to Keturah. "I'm not an expert on Oriande by any means, but from what I've seen, these people don't like it when you poke at the fabric of spacetime."

Keturah snorted. "Well, if there's one thing Alfor hasn't managed to lecture out of me yet, it's that it's always better to find the limits for yourself, rather than to ask beforehand where they are."

Matt raised an eyebrow at her. She didn't turn, but the corner of her mouth turned upward in a smile.

"You can always push farther when you're on the offensive than when you take a defensive course."

Matt chuckled, leaning back on his perch. "I'll have to remember that one," he said. "It might even work with some of my friends."

Keturah shifted. She turned her head only a fraction, not even enough for Matt to see her eyes, but he still got the sense that she was watching him. "You are paladins, are you not?"

"Hmm... No comment." Matt paused for a beat. "You know, we had an encounter with some other people we knew not too long ago. Turns out Oriande will let you get away with saying what's not true about the future way more easily than it'll let you get away with saying something that _is_ true."

This time, Keturah turned to face him directly, her eyes sharp. Matt stared back, wearing an easy smile, but after all, Allura had said that Keturah had been Zarkon's chief tactician. She knew what he was trying to say.

She hummed as she leaned back against the stone wall beside Matt. "Is that so? Interesting."

"Isn't it?" Matt worried his lip, debating his next move. He knew he couldn't actually change anything, so there wasn't anything to worry about--nothing beyond embarrassing himself by getting whisked away on accident after multiple demonstrations of Oriande's safeguards. And he was tempted to try to steer the conversation toward Zarkon, but he wasn't sure he was up for that, even if the safeguards let him go there. "So. What's it like flying the Red Lion?"

"It's..." Keturah lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "I'm sure it's not so different now compared to the future. Surely you could ask your own red paladin--assuming, of course, that it isn't you." Clearly she didn't expect him to answer that, for she went on after only a moment's pause. "The life of a paladin is unpredictable at best, but our lions and our team make up for that... when they aren't simply sowing more chaos."

"Like you aren't the worst of them."

Keturah stiffened, giving him a sharp look. "I suppose the princess has been telling stories about my younger years."

Matt's smile froze on his face, and he shrugged as nonchalantly as he could. "Some, I guess. I'm also kinda going on personal experience, though. Red seems to like a certain amount of..."

"Disregard for convention?" Keturah suggested. "Yes, I've noticed the same. But there is more than one way to be a paladin. Lealle is the only one of my teammates who has flown with Voltron longer than I have, so I can say with confidence that paladins and their successors often look nothing alike. Sa is far more excitable than his predecessor, and Rukka charges into the thick of things, where her predecessor strove always to avoid conflict. I have simply found a way to listen to my instincts without letting them rule me. I find it serves me well."

"Huh." Matt considered that, his eyes roving back across the plaza. Lealle had wandered over to join Val and Sa, and Matt could see Val struggling not to react. Honestly, Matt couldn't say he'd have been much different. Keturah was one thing. Rukka and Sa he would have been able to handle. But if Zarkon or Allura's parents struck up a conversation?

He felt sick just thinking about it, and however hard he tried not to let it show on his face, he still felt the weight of Keturah's attention on him.

"Something happened," she said.

Matt closed his eyes. Pushing the line was all well and good, but he wasn't naive enough to think that anyone would let this slide. Better to say nothing at all.

Keturah sighed. "It's all right. I didn't come here looking for knowledge of the future. There is enough to deal with in the present, I think."

"You said it." Matt's eyes drifted in the direction of the marketplace, thinking of his future self and the weight that had pulled at him. He kept telling himself not to get hung up on questions of what might have gone wrong, but he couldn't help it. He kept catching himself trying to phrase his Question so that the sages might not dismiss him out of hand as he tried to glean information about the future.

"We do what we can with the knowledge we have," Keturah said. "That's all anyone can ask of us."

"Yeah. I just wish I knew more."

Keturah smiled. "Well. We are in Oriande, after all. There's plenty of knowledge to be found here. You just need to get creative in how you seek it out."

* * *

A thousand worlds flashed through Allura's mind. She existed in each for an instant, all of them at once, and yet she felt on some level as though she didn't exist at all. There was only darkness, and pain, and wrongness, and a burning white light that never went away.

It was the flash of light from Lance's rifle as he fired two shots into Keith's chest. Berlou was a chaotic swirl of color around them as Matt raced over, unintelligible shouts on his lips. Shiro, still dressed in the Imperial armor he'd once worn, caught Keith as he fell, still gasping for breath as the light went out of him. Shiro screamed, then looked up as Lance shifted, and their eyes locked, Shiro's full of pain and a mounting terror, Lance's only just beginning to register the horror of what he'd done.

_**You think it is easy to tell right from wrong?** _

Another flash of white, this time Zarkon's bayard as Alfor raised his sword, poised to kill. Zarkon was young--too young--and scared, and Lealle screamed his name as Alfor struck. She moved faster than either of the combatants, flinging herself between Alfor and Zarkon, and it was her neck that Alfor's sword pierced. He stumbled back, and she collapsed, her whole body trembling as she curled into Zarkon's chest.

_**You think we here do not know the suffering the universe contains?** _

A flash, this time, as a wormhole opened and the Blue Lion emerged into a battlefield. The other four lions fought each other, Green tearing the metal from Yellow's neck, Black with wings aglow chasing down Red, who seemed to be trying to flee. Blue roared, and for a moment the other lions all froze.

" _Please_." An unfamiliar voice, but one Allura knew at once belonged to the blue paladin in this time. "Please, don't do this. We were meant to be a team--five lions, together, defending _all_ life, not just our own empires. We don't have to follow in the footsteps of those who came before."

Silence was his only answer. Silence, until the Black Lion turned and opened fire on Blue. It seemed to be a signal to the others, and they converged on the Blue Lion, who found herself cut off from escape. She began to charge a laser, then stopped herself, as though she couldn't bring herself to hurt her sisters.

(There was a screaming in the air, inaudible, and Allura wanted to be sick. She wanted to look away. But she couldn't. She could only watch until there was nothing left of the Blue Lion but scraps of metal and glowing motes of Quintessence that drifted away from the wreckage and winked out like dying stars.)

_**There is pain everywhere you look, and even the slightest push can take you there. Even a minute change can set the universe on a catastrophic path.** _

The flash of Matt's pistol as he fired at Keith's head. He missed, and Keith spun, throwing a dagger at Matt. It buried itself to the hilt in Matt's chest, and he dropped, eyes wide. Keith froze, staring down at the dying man until Keena came to lay a hand on his shoulder and turn him away as guards rushed in and dragged Matt away.

"Who was he?" Keith asked.

"An assassin," Keena said. "He wanted to steal the Red Lion from us. You handled yourself well, Keithka. I'm so proud of you."

Keith turned to look back toward the door, which was still open, a trail of crimson blood marking the guards' path. Matt was shouting now, bitter, scathing insults that sounded nothing like the Matt Allura knew.

There was another flash, and Matt's shouts cut off.

_**Zarkon's empire has killed a great many people, and we would erase its existence if we could, but it is not that simple. Too small a change might not affect the founding of the Empire at all. Too large, and it might only cause more death. The wrong change, at the wrong time, and the universe itself may simply collapse under the force of the tremors.** _

Lance.

Only Lance, alone in empty space. Fissures of white light surrounded him like lightning, like tears in reality that let the void of Oriande show through.

The scene flickered, and Lance stood on barren soil, broken and bleeding, his leg crushed. His face was caked with dirt and grime, and tears left clean streaks down his cheeks. He mumbled to himself, too low to hear, and clawed his way forward, even as the air around him rippled and a flash of white momentarily wiped the world away.

When it faded, he stood at the lip of a crater, the stone crumbling away beneath his feet.

He lifted his head, and his eyes blazed with white light, twin holes in the fabric of spacetime. They turned toward Allura, and she thought, for an instant, that he'd seen her. He smiled, and closed his eyes.

"I'm sorry," Lance said. "I had to. I _had_ to. They never deserved this."

The scene faded, and this time no others came to replace it. Allura found herself back in the void, heart hammering, hands shaking. She was crying, she realized, and as the visions resounded in her head she dropped to her knees. The clouds eddied around her, and she dug her fingers into her hair, cursing under her breath.

_**You cannot save them. However much you try, however much you fight, it can only end poorly for you. Even without our safeguards. Even were you free to meddle in the past…** _

The creature stepped out of the mists at last, and Allura's eyes widened. It was a kotha, pure white, with shimmering, iridescent patterns in its fur. It circled her once, then rubbed its head against her shoulder with a purr that reminded her of the Black Lion.

_**I am sorry, young one. But it does you no good to cling to things that will never be. You are here for a purpose, and you must not lose sight of that. Go to the sages. Ask your Questions. Then return to your fight--the one you are meant to fight. You have a heavy enough burden without taking on more.** _

Allura blinked, tears dripping from her chin as she reached out, tentatively threading her fingers through the kotha's fur. It was impossibly smooth, cool to the touch, yet almost insubstantial. And again as she touched it, its purr radiating up her arm, she felt as though she were speaking to Black.

She wished she were, suddenly. She wished she were back with Shiro and the rest of her team, with only the ordinary worries to sort out.

 _**I know,** _ the kotha said. _**I know it hurts. And I am sorry. But the way to healing is never back. You must move forward, and build happiness for yourself in the universe that** _ **is** _._

The last dam broke, and Allura flung her arms around the kotha's neck, sobbing into its fur for all that she'd lost and for all that she would need to face once more when she left this place.

* * *

The robeast was awake.

Sam had sensed it as soon as Rolo woke him, had dreamed of it last night. Creeping tendrils and quiet awareness and a hunger suddenly roaring to life. He'd known this was coming ever since he first discovered the robeast shell, but it was different now, and he feared he didn't have much more time before he discovered what it meant to become a robeast.

They marched him to the more distant lab, the one they'd used ever since Sam and Rolo had destroyed the first. Neither Rax nor Rolo had yet been brought here; Rax hadn't been taken at all since the rampage, and Rolo only the once, to wherever they'd attached the new leg--not here, surely. This was a smaller room, most of the space taken up by a large, coffin-like chamber surrounded by electronic devices that were somehow warded against Sam's influence. This wasn't the sort of place one performed surgery.

More the sort of place one crafted a robeast, he suspected.

He resisted only once, when they went to lower him into the chamber, which stood waist-high on a metal dais. The last time they'd put him in there, he'd nearly lost himself, his mind pulling one way while his Quintessence pulled another. It was the first proof he'd had that soul and Quintessence were not one and the same, and he shivered at the memory.

Something struck him in the back of the head, and his vision flickered out for an instant. When it cleared, they had already stuffed him into the box, which hummed around him in a strange and dizzying rhythm.

"Is it ready?"

The voice drifted to him over the currents of sound, and he blinked, trying to focus on it even as he felt himself getting picked apart piece by piece and scattered to the winds.

"It's ready. Entering coordinates for Renxora. Let's see what this thing can do.

Something chimed, and a shimmering violet barrier closed across the top of the chamber. Sam's breath faltered, his heart pounding in his ears, and then something gave a horrible lurch in his stomach. The entity he'd sensed within the robeast shell roared anticipation and raced closer, filling up what little space was left inside this coffin until Sam could hardly tell where he ended and it began.

Another second, and even that thin barrier dissolved, leaving only an aura of sickly green.

* * *

Thirty minutes into Renxora, and the solitude was starting to get to Pidge. They'd run into three more sentry patrols, hiding from the first two and disabling the third--but so far, that was _all_ they'd found. They passed empty cells and dark rooms stocked with glass vials and silver trays but nothing that made it seem like someone was planning on using it anytime soon.

Another floor down, and empty labs gave way to dusty storage closets packed with yellowed linens, vacuum-sealed crates, and canisters of nutrient paste that bore no expiration date. Pidge knew, logically, that nutrient paste was like food goo--designed to stay good for years after the seal was broken and packaged to last almost indefinitely, but that didn't stop the shudder of revulsion as they saw all the dust piled up around the canisters. Seemed like no one had been in this room for months, at the least.

"I don't like this," Pidge muttered to Ryner as they descended another floor. They were ten deep by now, and the scanners showed another five below that, and still there was no sign of the prisoners that supposedly were being held here. "You don't think... There's no way this place is abandoned, right? We saw all the bio signatures upstairs."

Ryner nodded, though she seemed uncertain. "I saw," she said. "Though you're right--this is odd. I'm starting to wonder if it would have been possible for someone to fake the BLIP-tech scans."

"Why, though?" Pidge asked. They leaned out of the elevator, adrenaline giving a half-hearted twinge as they did so. The endless repetition with only occasional, low-level threats, was starting to wear at them, and they felt their alertness flagging. That made this the perfect time for an ambush, of course, but even knowing that, they only went through the motions of clearing the corridor.

No one was here.

Not the Galra, not any prisoners, and certainly not their father.

"Damn it," Pidge growled, wedging their bayard into the nearest door and prying it open, bit by bit--even though hacking the controls would have been much simpler, and probably much faster. They needed to fight something, though. They needed to feel the burn in their muscles that said they were making progress at something, even if it wasn't what they wanted. "What is this? A trap? Are they just playing mind games with us, now?"

"I'm not sure." Ryner laid a hand on their shoulder, her voice hovering just above a whisper. "But we should be careful in any case."

Pidge nodded, and after confirming that the door hid yet another storage closet, they started moving again, hand on their bayard and one eye on the scans. There was another sentry patrol on this floor, more empty cells below, and then, finally, the scanners picked up a glimmer of Quintessence all the way down on the eighteenth subfloor.

"Could be danger," Ryner warned, even as she followed Pidge into the elevator and pushed the button for the appropriate floor.

And, well, yeah. That was a given. There could be anything waiting for them down there. A robeast, or a sea of guards, or creatures like the Ziva they'd encountered on Vel-17. Haggar was ruthless in her experimentation, and she never hesitated to sic her monsters on the paladins.

But there might also be prisoners down there. Maybe their father was among them, maybe not. Maybe someone had information about him, or the computers contained records that would point Pidge to the next holding facility. In the end, it didn't really matter, because Pidge wasn't leaving until they got to the bottom of this.

The elevator let out onto an empty hallway, just as quiet and even darker than everything else in this place. Pidge felt the weight of hundreds of feet of stone and steel bearing down on them: a tangible pressure in the air that left them short of breath and jumping at shadows. They kept their bayard out, and Ryner prowled beside them, the stone on her bracelet glowing as she readied herself to activate her Olkari-tech pistol.

Pidge glanced at their scanner and gestured to the left. They opened their mouth to let Ryner know which way they were headed, but thought better of it and settled for a nod. Maybe this wasn't a trap. That was still no reason for Pidge to go disturbing this unnatural silence.

They stalked down the hallway, every sense on alert, and paused at every corner to check the way ahead. Even here, there was no sign of guards, and Pidge's skin crawled as the silence thickened.

Then, finally, they came to a door that was right on top of the Quintessence signature on Pidge's map. They pulled up outside it, holding up a hand to clue Ryner in, and they exchanged looks. Ryner's pistol grew over her hand, and she nodded, taking up position beside the door, back against the wall and eyes roving the corridor, as Pidge directed Rover to the keypad with a sharp hiss and crouched down. (That was one advantage of being short, they'd learned; no one ever aimed low.)

The door slid open, and Pidge darted forward in a crouch, bayard humming as they searched for a target.

The room was empty.

Pidge took cover against a computer console, turning one way, then another, bayard up and ready. They scanned the darkness for threats, checked for furniture that might be used as cover, even checked the ceiling for vents large enough to hide a living creature. There was nothing. Just the freestanding computer terminal in the center of the room, an empty chair in front of it, and a cylinder of bubbling magenta liquid standing in the corner by the door.

"Quintessence," Ryner whispered. "No wonder the scanners picked it up. I've never seen so much in one place."

Pidge had, but only once: at the robeast research lab on Maorel, where the druids had an entire fleet of robeasts in the making. Their stomach churned, and they tried not to think about the fact that their dad had been here at one point, and had probably been subject to whatever experiments the druids had been running.

They sat down at the computer, more than a little surprised when it turned on without prompting. The Galra had taken care to clear out everything else in this base, and most of what they'd passed through had been running on minimal power. And then there was this room, with a tank full of valuable Quintessence to serve as a beacon and a computer just _jumping_ at the chance to be used.

Heart pounding, Pidge delved into the files--or rather, the file. There was only one saved to this computer; everything else had been wiped clean. It reeked even more of a trap than before, and Pidge glanced at Ryner, who stood guard at their shoulder, watching the door. She darted a look at the display screen when she noticed Pidge's hesitation, though, and her lips pulled down into a frown.

"We've come this far..." Ryner said, though she didn't sound very sure of herself.

Pursing their lips, Pidge clicked on the file. A new window popped up, and a recording began to play. It showed a laboratory with an exam table center-stage.

Pidge's dad was strapped to the table, his eyes darting side-to-side as he strained to follow the flurry of activity all around him. "What's happening?" he asked, clearly trying to keep his voice even. "What do you want from me? Why did you bring me here? I haven't done anything wrong."

"Dad," Pidge whispered, tears prickling behind their eyes as the video played out. Sam fell silent, his face gaunt and tired. Pidge scanned the recording for some sign of when this had been recorded. It sounded like their dad had only just been transferred, but they didn't trust that. Maybe they'd been holding him for some time before they brought him to the lab.

Ryner reached out to squeeze their shoulder as the Galra in the lab finally turned their attention Sam's way. A medical robot approached with a syringe, and Sam shied away, his composure fracturing as he pulled against his restraints, but it was useless. The needle pricked his arm, the plunger forced clear liquid into his veins, and then the robot retreated. A few moments later, Sam shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut.

Sedatives--it was obvious soon enough as Sam's eyes began to droop. His head lolled, but as it did so, his attention turned toward something out of the view of the camera that made him go rigid.

"No," he whispered. "Please, no..."

Pidge was on the edge of hyperventilation, but they couldn't look away from the recording as a druid stepped into frame, running a hand over Sam's cheek as he made feeble efforts to pull away. They wanted to stop the video, shut it off, charge out of here in search of something to beat up, but they were frozen in their seat, eyes glued to the druid, whose hand began to glow.

Sam moaned, eyelids fluttering, and the druid touched the very tip of their claws to his temple, cocking their head to the side.

"Yes," they said after a long moment. "This one will do nicely. Given the right circumstances, he will fashion himself into the linchpin and bring it all together."

"Should we prep him for transfer?" someone asked.

The druid pulled back their hands but regarded Sam for another interminable moment. "Not yet. The facility is not yet ready and we are still considering our options for the other subjects. Begin the preparations here, and I will let you know when we are ready for him."

There was a murmured chorus of _Vrepit sa_ before the recording cut off, and Pidge's stomach churned as the next video began to play, this one showing their dad in a different lab, hooked up to a cannister of synthetic Quintessence like the one casting Pidge's shadow on the wall in unearthly tones.

More and more recordings played out, some short, some long and uneventful. Sam in a lab getting poked and prodded, Sam in a med bay with a monitor displaying his heart rate and other vitals, Sam shivering alone in an empty cell.

But it was the last recording that made the bottom drop out of their stomach. The druid was back, and Pidge's dad was once more sedated as the druid touched two claws to his temple and studied him.

"He is ready," they said. "As are we. I will call for a transport in the morning. Vindication begins tomorrow."

The recording ended, and this time there was nothing to follow it. The display screen went blank, its weak light dancing in the tears that had gathered in Pidge's eyes. A helpless rage threatened to choke them, and they closed out of the player, calling up a command-line program to dig into the files.

"No," they snarled. "That can't be it. There has to be something more here. Something they forgot to delete. Something they tried to hide." Their hands shook so bad they could barely type, and they cursed as they had to retry the same command three times before getting out what they meant to.

Everything they tried turned up nothing, though, and their breath kept coming shorter and faster as the panic set in.

"Pidge," Ryner said.

"No! He was here! They had him here! _Where did they take him?_ Damn it!"

A shudder ran through the building, making the screen flicker momentarily. Pidge froze, holding their breath as the stillness returned.

Another tremor followed moments later, and Pidge's anxiety ticked up another notch. They looked at Ryner, whose face was grim.

"A trap," she said. "I knew it. Come on. We need to get out of here."

Pidge sent one more frantic look at the computer, then cursed and left it behind.

* * *

A flash of light in the middle of the street announced Allura’s return, and Matt slid off the stone wall, ready to go greet her. He slowed, however, as Lealle rushed to Allura’s side, pulling her into an embrace. Allura’s eyes were dry, but her lips pressed together like she was fighting the urge to cry, and she stared fixedly over Lealle’s shoulder.

Lealle pulled back, frowning, as Alfor joined them, and Matt caught Val’s eye across the street . As one, they started forward, Val slipping past Lealle to reach Allura and whisper in her ear. Matt joined them just as Allura gave a jerky nod and breathed in.

"Sorry," she said, forcing a smile for her parents. "It's been a long week. As much as I'd love to tour Oriande with you, we have our own problems to see to. Perhaps it's best that we part ways here."

Matt saw Katrona open her mouth to agree, and he fixed her with a glare vicious enough to silence her. Allura hesitated for a moment, then flung herself at her mother, clinging to her so tightly that there was no way Lealle didn't notice the tremble in her hands. Matt only prayed Oriande wouldn't consider this to be giving away too much about the future. Allura looked close enough to breaking already without getting ripped away yet again.

Thankfully, it seemed she hadn't crossed that line yet, and when she finally released her mother, she gave her father a hug that was no less desperate, though it didn't last nearly as long.

"It was..." Allura hesitated, her smile wavering, then finally shook her head. "I should go now. I love you both."

"Love you, too, sweetheart," Lealle said, and Matt himself nearly burst into tears at the sorrow in her voice. Did she know, he wondered? Did she realize that she was dead in Allura's time? Or did she only know that her daughter was hurting and that she couldn't do anything to help?

Either way, it seemed to rattle Allura, and she turned away, hurrying to where Edi and Aneta sat. Allura's hands clawed at the fabric over her chest as Alfor called, "I love you, sweetheart."

Val hurried after Allura, and Matt turned to follow them, but hesitated as Alfor's group drew together, sneaking glances at Allura and conferring in low voices. Aneta and Katrona bustled around, shooing the two groups off. Aneta called out for Matt and he waved to her, trudging over.

As soon as her back was turned, he stopped again, waiting until his friends were out of sight around the next corner. There was plenty of knowledge to be found here, Keturah had said. Matt just needed to get creative in how he sought it out.

Maybe she was right.

Heart hammering, he turned and slunk off after Alfor's group.

* * *

Pidge ran, only doing perfunctory sweeps for any guards or sentries who may have set an ambush for them. The floor bucked beneath their feet at irregular intervals, and each time it did it threatened to throw them to the floor.

Ryner reached out to steady them as another tremor hit, more intense than before. It had been getting worse as they neared the surface--taking the stairs this time because part of the elevator shaft had collapsed in the early impacts. Whatever this was, it was clearly coming from outside the base. A weapon or a robeast of some sort.

It wasn't just the impacts that were steadily increasing in amplitude that told Pidge that; Green was near to panic, her voice incomprehensible. It was all Pidge could do to convince her to stay hidden until they made it out with Ryner. She seemed ready to launch into battle without them, and the bond thrummed with a creeping, nauseating sensation that told Pidge that something was _wrong_.

"Almost there," Pidge said, catching themself on the steps as the next impact smashed their sense of balance. Dust rained down from the ceiling, and all around them metal groaned in protest. "Two more minutes."

Less than that, as it turned out. Just as they reached the next landing--subfloor three, according to the placard--Green roared a warning. Without thinking, Pidge threw themself against the wall, ducking down and activating their shield, which they raised over their head. They heard Ryner do the same behind them, but there was no time to check on her. Even as Pidge's shield hummed to life, the stairwell exploded. The shrieking of metal, the thunder of support beams snapping like twigs, hammered against Pidge until they thought they would go deaf. They curled in on themself, tucking as much of their body under their shield as they could and grunting as something slammed against it.

The storm seemed to go on forever, and even after it stopped, Pidge remained frozen, ears ringing. Their shield arm throbbed from shoulder all the way down to the tips of their fingers, and it was only when they tried to move that they realized several large chunks of building had landed on top of them.

On top of them--and more immediately worrisome, on top of their right foot, which hadn't quite made it under the cover of their shield.

Pidge twisted, bracing both arms and their one free leg against their shield and shoving until the rubble fell away to the side. The motion pulled at their pinned foot, and they bit down on a scream. The pain faded back to a dull roar when they stilled, and they weren't sure if that was because the injury wasn't bad, or just because the adrenaline was blocking it out. They weren't sure they wanted to find out.

They tried to breathe in, slow and steady, the way you were supposed to breathe when you were on the verge of a panic attack, but dust hung thick in the air, and Pidge choked on it, their lungs heaving and their sides aching as they gasped for air. Tears gathered in the corners of their eyes. They doubled over, reaching for the twisted hunk of metal pinning them, and shoved at it as another coughing fit overtook them.

Something shifted in the gloom, and Pidge froze, every sense on alert. They felt like a rabbit being stalked by a wolf--except this thing was much, _much_ larger than a wolf. They dared not move even enough to look at it, but they saw the shape of it from the periphery: something huge and hulking, digging through the rubble to their right and another floor up. Searching for them, probably.

Pidge opened their hand, ready to summon their bayard. They could cut through the rubble pinning them--could cut through their own foot if they had to--and then they'd run. Not the best plan, but better than sitting here waiting to get turned into robeast chow.

"Wait."

Ryner's voice was hardly a whisper in their ear--a breath amplified by the comms--but it stopped Pidge in their tracks, the glow of the indicator lights on their armor casting ghostly currents in the dust-filled air. Ryner moved silently to crouch beside Pidge, her hand curling around their wrist.

"It's okay, Pidge," she whispered. "Just breathe. I'm going to seal your helmet. Your suit will cycle out the dust and you'll be able to breathe better."

Well, duh. Pidge furrowed their brow as Ryner did as she'd said, the bottom half of Pidge's helmet sealing shut. It sounded so obvious when Ryner said it, and Pidge's first instinct was to get indignant that Ryner felt she had to explain something so obvious. But then, if it was obvious, why hadn't Pidge thought of it?

"Breathe," Ryner reminded them.

Pidge focused on breathing, tugging once more at their leg until Ryner placed a calming hand on their knee.

"Let me," she whispered, shifting forward until her outstretched fingers brushed the metal. "I'm going to reshape this to free your foot. If you can run, we'll run, otherwise I'll carry you. Green is close."

"I know," Pidge said, and it was only once they heard their own voice echoing in their ears that they realized it was the first thing they'd said since the explosion. Their hearing was still muddled from the noise of the collapse, and Ryner had already freed their foot by the time they registered the glow of her gauntlet and the impossibly smooth curl of metal bending back from their ankle.

Something else noticed the Quintessence glow in the darkness.

It was the sudden silence where there had been the shriek of metal-on-metal. It was the stillness that suddenly became overpowering. Pidge hadn't noticed the motion or the sound until its absence, but the darkness became abruptly too much, and Pidge felt the numbness begin to yield to terror.

"Pidge!" Ryner hissed, her tone suggesting that it wasn't the first time she'd called Pidge's name. She was pulling on their arm, trying to get them to stand, and Pidge did so sluggishly, their head stuffed full of static.

"Can you walk?"

They stared at her, uncomprehending, until she tried to pick them up. They pulled back, and their ankle gave a sharp stab of pain.

They sucked in a breath, but steeled themself and squeezed Ryner's hand.

"I'm fine," they said. "It'll be faster."

That wasn't all of what they'd meant to say, they knew, but it was hard to string words together right now. It was hard to string _thoughts_ together, so they let Ryner pull them along, Pidge hobbling as best they could. They just had to get to Green, and then they'd be fine. There was nothing here that needed to be saved. No prisoners, no civilians. Just an empty base that had already been stripped of anything useful. They could open a wormhole and escape in two seconds flat.

It would be fine.

Pidge pitched forward, and it was only the fact that Ryner stumbled, too, that suggested it wasn't just Pidge's own sense of balance betraying them. The light changed, and a chill raced up Pidge's spine as a presence filled the air behind them.

They turned, not breathing, and for a moment they thought that Green had come to get them.

It looked like the Green Lion, certainly: the same feline snout, the same three-foot claws and broad chest and shield the size of a bus on its back.

In fact, it looked like someone had made a copy of the Green Lion, then filled it in with the void between stars. Rather than silver, the metal was a matte black so deep Pidge's eyes refused to focus on it, even as one massive paw gouged a hole in the floor before them. Rather than golden eyes and luminous blue accents, this creature burned magenta with synthetic Quintessence.

And where its chest and face should have been a cheery kelly green, it was instead lime green, bright enough to make Pidge's eyes sting.

Somewhere, distantly, Green screamed, fear and horror mingling in the bond as the False Green Lion lifted its head and _roared_.


	28. Questions Asked

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Team Hogwarts ran into Alfor and the previous generation of paladins on the streets of Oriande. Allura tried to get across a warning, but kept getting pulled away to a white void where a white kotha showed her visions of what the universe might become from the slightest of pushes.
> 
> Meanwhile, Pidge and Ryner delved into the lab and Renxora, which was empty except for a single computer with a single file: videos showing experiments being run on Sam before he was transferred to Vindication. The druids currently holding Sam activated his robeast, a dark replica of the Green Lion, and sent it to Renxora, where it brought the building down on Pidge and Ryner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I forgot to include this in the notes last time, but in case it wasn't obvious, the every-other-week updates are continuing through July. I'm mostly back on track now, though, so we should be back to regular weekly updates in August--just in time for Voltron: Duality's two year anniversary!
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: Graphic (not gory/bloody, but otherwise intense) descriptions of injury. Be wary of all Pidge scenes, but in particular if you're squeamish, you should probably skip the two paragraphs following, "With Ryner's hand on their arm."
> 
> Also, there's just... a lot of swearing in this chapter, and some brief discussions of genocide and other heavy topics.

The longer Val spent roaming the streets of Oriande, the more it felt like one big city-shaped letdown. Far from the ancient ruins full of mystery and buried secrets she’d been promised, the real Oriande had turned out to be fifty percent bureaucratic nightmare, fifty percent watching your friends have emotional breakdowns over running into the almost-literal ghosts of their past.

Allura was still rigid, her eyes rimmed in red, her steps purposeful. Aneta had to scurry to keep up--and keeping up was probably a good idea, considering Val was pretty sure Allura wasn't stopping for anything. If their guide didn't want to point them in the right direction, then Allura would just keep walking anyway. It... probably wasn't that hard to find their way to the sprawling temple complex on the opposite side of the city.

Val hovered close, though she didn't offer any comfort just yet. Allura looked ready to punch the first person to try it, and besides that, Val was too busy watching Edi for signs that she might just plow on ahead and start poking at bears.

Val couldn't say she knew what Allura was feeling right now, not really, but she had some idea of the magnitude of her emotional turmoil. (Take Val's sorrow over finally meeting Lealle in the flesh while knowing how that story ended, add in her sympathetic ache over seeing Allura tear herself apart trying to say something to her parents without tripping any supernatural proximity alarms, blend it all together with the visceral wrongness of a Zarkon who _wasn't_ actively trying to kill her--then multiply it all by about a thousand. That ought to get you to the right ballpark.)

"Are... you sure you're ready for this?" Aneta asked, blatantly failing to read the room. "Your Questions are quite momentous, you know. I wouldn't want you to go in under-prepared and regret it later."

"The sooner we ask our Questions, the sooner we can leave, correct?" Allura asked primly. "As far as I'm concerned, moving swiftly is the first and only consideration for the remainder of our visit."

Val grimaced, but reached out to touch Edi's arm before she could say anything that might further upset Allura. Efficiency probably _was_ for the best. There was no telling how long they'd been here already, and Val itched to get back to the others before something went wrong.

"I'm with Allura," Val said. "I pretty much have my Question picked out already, anyway. Just need to figure out how to word it." Allura flashed her a grateful smile, and Val responded by leaning closer so their shoulders bumped together. "That okay with you, Edi?"

"I guess so." Edi shrugged. "I don't know if my Question is good enough, but I think I have one."

Val tweaked her ear through her hood. "I'm sure it's a great Question. Matt?"

There was no answer from behind. The silence prickled at her neck, and her stomach sank. Oh, god. She’d thought that just because Keith wasn’t here to egg him on he wouldn’t do anything reckless. What a fool she was. She turned, ready to fight him on whatever it was he was planning--but the street was empty.

Or, well, not totally empty. There were a few other pilgrim groups and plenty of Oriandites in their color-coded robes. But no Matt.

Val squeezed her eyes shut, foreboding inching down her spine. "Aw, Quiznak."

* * *

Pidge stared up at the false Green Lion, horror locking them in place. This went beyond an ordinary robeast--beyond Haggar's usual creations dressed up to look like Green. There was a calculating presence behind those eyes, an awareness that speared Pidge through and drove out all hope of escape. What chance did they have against something like this?

(And it wasn't just that. There was something almost familiar about this creature. A creeping dread that twisted because Pidge felt like they should have seen this coming.)

"Pidge!" Ryner called. She was close, her hand wrapped around Pidge's bicep, but her voice on the comms sounded faint, like there was interference on the line. "We need to go. _Pidge_."

Pidge turned, mustering all their willpower to wrench their eyes away from the false Lion. Its gaze went beyond unsettling, and even when they weren't looking at it they could feel it watching them. Waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

With Ryner's hand on their arm urging them to move, Pidge tried to run, but they made it only a single step before their ankle gave out. There was a sensation, sharp and stomach-turning, that wasn't quite pain. Only a lurch as their foot caught on a piece of rubble, and they briefly lost track of which direction was up. Then Ryner's arms looping around them to keep them upright.

They tried, again, to get their feet moving, but their left foot refused to cooperate. The leg responded just fine, but with each step the toe dragged on the ground, and their weight came down with the queasy not-quite pain as their ankle wobbled and sent them crashing sideways into Ryner.

Behind them, metal shrieked against metal.

Pidge reached out for their bayard, but they were in an awkward position, listing against Ryner, their arms tangled with hers, their head spinning. They didn't have to look to see the false Lion bearing down on them, and the panic that its presence incited only made their vision go dark around the edges.

Ryner twisted, pulling Pidge to one side to free up her other arm, which she pressed against the wall of this corridor. Blinding green light filled the air, and tears sprang to Pidge's eyes. Their hair stood on end as more metal squealed and groaned. They turned just in time to see support beams burst from the walls like compound fractures, interlocking to form a barrier between the paladins and the false Lion.

"Let's go," Ryner said.

The light faded in a blink, and violet spots swarmed Pidge's vision as they let Ryner lead them, supporting most of their weight as stumbled along, fighting for every step. They tried not to think about what their ankle must look like under their armor, which was cracked now, and shifting, turning their stomach every time the broken pieces rubbed against their foot. They tried not to think of broken bones and torn ligaments, of each faltering step doing more damage. They just needed to get out.

The false Lion roared, and for a moment Pidge felt as though there were words in the sound, though of course that was ridiculous. Robeasts couldn't _talk_. It was just their ears playing tricks on them. The ringing from the building collapse hadn't gone away yet, and it still sounded like the inside of Hephaestus's forge as the false Lion tried to break through Ryner's barricade.

If the metal's groaning was anything to go by, the barricade wasn't going to last long.

Ryner pressed her hand to the wall twice more as they fled, shaping more barriers behind them, but even from their decidedly less than optimal vantage point, Pidge could see the strain gathering around Ryner's eyes. Her skin in the ambient light of her visor display was waxen and pale, and she was breathing harder than she should have been. Maybe that was because she was practically carrying Pidge.

Grimacing, Pidge shook off the stupor that had fallen over them after the collapse. They needed to get out of here, and soon. How far down were they? Pidge couldn't remember which floor they'd been on when the false Lion broke through, but they were close. And considering how long the attack had been going on before the false Lion found them, they might only be a level or two away from open air. If Green could find them--if they could save the time of hiking all the way back to where they'd left her--then their odds of survival shot way up.

Pidge reached out, and Green answered almost instantly, closer and more _present_ than Pidge had expected. Clearly she'd already noticed the robeast (of course she had; something that big and noisy was pretty hard to miss) and she was looking for a way to get to them.

Alarm spiked in Green's presence just as the loudest crash yet sounded from behind. Pidge twisted in Ryner's grip, their stomach dropping as the false Lion's claws dug trenches in the floor. It had shattered the first barricade and a good section of the corridor beyond, and even as Pidge watched, the second barricade snapped between wicked metal teeth easily as long as Pidge.

They turned, hobbling faster, but there was no way they were going to outrun something like that. Not with Pidge injured, and maybe not even if they'd been in good shape.

The Green Lion's roar resounded in the corridor, bolstering Pidge as the false Lion snarled. Pidge felt the collision in their bones and glanced one more time over their shoulder as Green ripped the imposter away from the opening. It was too dark to make out more than the flash of claws, the bulk of the two massive creatures, and the occasional flash of blue, gold, or magenta light.

But it was a chance, and Pidge wasn't about to squander it. As the two lions wrestled in the darkness, Pidge and Ryner struggled on.

* * *

Matt was lost.

To be fair, he wasn't any _more_ lost than he would have been if he'd gone with his team instead of following Alfor's, considering the scale of Oriande and the fact that Matt had yet to see a single map. All the pilgrims were sure to end up at the temple eventually, so he probably wouldn't be lost forever, but still. This may not have been the best idea in the world.

He couldn't bring himself to regret it, though. Too much about this place bugged him, starting with the fact that Fligg had seemed so sure that coming here was important. Matt supposed Fligg might have just been talking about the Questions they got to ask the sages, but considering none of them knew what it was they were supposed to be asking, Matt kind of doubted it. It seemed more likely that something about all these run-ins with their future selves and the past paladins were going to end up being significant.

Somehow.

So really, Matt was just giving the universe a better chance at getting across whatever it needed to get across.

At least... that was what he told himself. It didn't do much to counter to the guilt that crawled beneath his skin every time he encountered an Oriandite in the crowd. Their perplexed, sometimes suspicious glances chased him, and it took a grand total of five minutes before he was having serious second thoughts about this plan.

By that point, of course, it was too late. He'd have a better shot at finding his friends again if he just waited on the temple steps, rather than wandering the city aimlessly. He just had to keep Alfor's group in sight until then.

Of course, keeping them in sight meant that he saw the way they interacted, and it reminded him far too much of his own team for comfort. Sa flitted around the street like Hunk and Pidge fawning over alien tech, though Sa seemed more interested in statues, pillars, and buildings that bore runes Matt's translator couldn't decipher. Lealle and Rukka kept up a steady stream of chatter that pulled laughter from the others, even Keturah, who seemed the most straight-laced of the group.

Perhaps the most unsettling part was the obvious familiarity between Alfor and Zarkon. Matt had heard plenty of times about how Alfor had trusted Zarkon with his life, how Allura had once considered him family, but somehow when he'd pictured the time before the war he'd always imagined Zarkon holding himself apart from the others. This was... not that.

"One time, Zarkon, that's all I'm asking." Sa had his arms looped around Zarkon's elbow. He was small enough, and Zarkon tall enough, that when Sa pulled his knees up to his chest he dangled a few inches off the ground.

Zarkon gave him an exasperated look, but didn't protest being made to carry his teammate. "Sa, we are _guests_ here. What sort of message does it send if we vandalize the monuments of Oriande?"

"It's not really vandalism," Alfor pointed out. "You aren't damaging anything. Just... scaling a couple of statues to get a better view."

"Or we could not do that," their guide, Katrona, said. "That's always another option."

Zarkon ignored the guide in favor of giving Alfor a flat look. "I thought the point of this excursion was to teach me how to be a better black paladin, not to get me in trouble with the guardians of history itself."

"Ooh, the guardians of history," Lealle murmured. "I like that. Makes it sound like we're part of some grand epic."

Keturah rubbed her temples and quickened her pace so she could insert herself between Zarkon and Alfor. "Don't listen to them, Zarkon. You know how this team gets. If you're going to lead us, you need to learn not to cave to their whims."

Rukka whispered something to Lealle, who burst out laughing, winning twin glares from Zarkon and Keturah. "Sorry." Lealle waved her hands in front of her, not looking at all apologetic. "Rukka does have a point though--if you shouldn't listen to whatever we say, why should you listen to Keturah, either?"

Matt dropped back a few paces as the group descended into bickering, all of it accompanied by easy smiles. Even Zarkon's lips twitched from time to time, and Keturah's sour face reminded Matt of Keith: it wasn't that she was angry with her team, or irritated by Lealle’s quip. She just didn't smile as readily as the others.

It all made the fact of Zarkon's betrayal that much worse. This had been a real team. A real _family_. They'd trusted each other, loved each other. They'd had something good here.

So why had Zarkon throw it all away?

After a few more turns, seemingly at random, they came to a market. Unlike the stalls Matt had seen earlier that mostly sold food, clothing, and other necessities, these ones looked like they'd been plucked right out of a craft fair. Paintings, jewelry, pottery, sculptures, blankets and bags woven or embroidered with intricate designs...

Were they actually selling souvenirs?

Whatever the case, Lealle's eyes lit up at something she saw. She grabbed Alfor by the elbow and dragged him deeper into the market. Matt caught a flash of surprise on Alfor's face, and then they were gone. The rest of the team traded looks that said this was far from new ground for them, then plunged into the crowd in pursuit of the king and queen.

The overwhelming number of people packed into the marketplace threw a wrench in Matt's plan to hang back. He didn't want to be spotted, and not overhearing any more conversations was a definite plus. But losing the people who were supposed to lead him to the temple was also a bad idea.

He hesitated a moment longer, cursing himself for running off. (The others.... might have a point when they called the Reds reckless, not that Matt would ever admit that out loud.) Then he plunged into the market, eyes scanning the crowd for signs of Alfor or any of his paladins. The trick would be spotting them before they spotted him.

It was hard to stay focused, though, with so many voices calling out at once. Something about this place felt contrived--like an amateur Renaissance Faire that hadn’t quite hit the mark. You knew what they were going for, and if you wanted to, you could absolutely get caught up in the atmosphere they were selling, but little things kept breaking the illusion. Except instead of cell phones and sneakers and one too many water bottles, it was more subtle. Matt wasn't sure he could have pointed to specific anachronisms, seeing as he was all but wholly ignorant of Altean history and culture, but he couldn’t help feeling like everyone he looked at had only just put on a mask to fool him.

How much of Oriande was like this? It was all just a show put on to distract pilgrims from the fact that the city was teeming with secrets the locals didn't want them chasing. The guides were there to steer them away from places or people who might screw with the timestream, obviously, which meant that a lot of the _real_ Oriande probably existed at the edges of the city.

But why stop there? Oriande had all the time in the world--or at least all the time in an Altean lifespan, which was still hundreds of years. Hundreds of years for dozens of people, all compacted into a single day. Who was to say they hadn't crafted everything from scratch? The statues, the museums, all the art and culture and historical landmarks that Aneta had rambled on about for most of the morning... For all Matt knew he hadn't seen a single real thing since coming here, aside from the people he was unceremoniously shuffled away from.

He spotted Lealle through a gap in the crowd, her face positively glowing as she leaned her elbow on the stall, flashed a smile, and sweet-talked the merchant selling what looked like brightly colored scarves. A flash of white hair said Alfor was still with her, but they were both too far away for Matt to tell anything else.

He needed to get closer, or else risk getting left behind. If only he knew where the others had gone...

"You're one of Allura's friends."

Matt nearly jumped out of his skin at the voice. Zarkon's voice. Right behind him. He spun, heart pounding, and stared down the emperor of half the known universe.

He was younger than Matt had guessed.

He knew Zarkon hadn't always been immortal. He knew Zarkon had come to the castle-ship as a teenager in the wake of the Vkullor attack that had decimated Daibazaal. But knowing that in the abstract was one thing. Realizing that the young Galra standing before him was no older than Matt himself? That was something else entirely.

Matt didn't realize he'd summoned his bayard until Zarkon's eyes darted toward it, and he let it go quickly before the supernatural police came by to put him in time-out.

Oriande didn't seem to care about the slip, but Zarkon's face did tighten, as though in pain, and Matt's breath stalled in his lungs.

"I'm sorry."

"What?" Matt whispered.

Zarkon lifted his head, strain around his eyes plucking at Matt's guilt. "I said I'm sorry. I don't know what happens between my time and yours, but it's clear I've done something to lose your trust."

 _Lose._ Right. That would imply that he had it to begin with, and Matt almost had to laugh. Almost, except Zarkon actually seemed _sincere_. How much had he figured out? He didn't seem surprised by Matt having the bayard, so he'd probably already guessed that he was a paladin, but now he knew for sure--and that Matt piloted Red, to boot. But did he know that his entire team was dead in Matt's time, or did he think they'd just retired?

Did he know it wasn't just Matt who feared him?

"You don't need to say anything," Zarkon said, holding up his hands. "I understand enough of how Oriande works to know that it won't go anywhere. I doubt I could fix whatever happens anyway. Not without rewriting history, which everyone assures me is impossible."

"So I've heard," Matt said tightly. It was a struggle not to reach out for his bayard again--this was _Zarkon_ , and he was close enough to run Matt through in the blink of an eye if he decided to go for his bayard. The fact that he seemed completely non-aggressive was small comfort when Matt was intimately familiar with the kind of violence this man was capable of.

Zarkon searched him, his gaze so intense Matt almost broke and made a run for it. Then, finally, Zarkon sighed. "Very well." He stepped back, opening space between them. Matt finally started breathing again. "I will tell no one that I have seen you, but I suggest you return to your friends and continue your own pilgrimage. I doubt the keepers of Oriande would appreciate you meddling like this."

"It's not meddling if I don't do anything," Matt snapped, and instantly wished he could swallow his words. He reached his hand behind him, ready to summon his bayard if Zarkon got violent.

But Zarkon only laughed, his smile not quite reaching his eyes. "I see why Keturah's lion chose you. You two have the same rebellious streak. Try not to let it get you into too much trouble?"

He waited another moment, smile slipping as Matt remained silent, then gave a sober nod and retreated into the crowd.

As soon as he was gone, Matt's legs turned to jelly, and he barely saved himself from collapsing right there in the middle of the street.

Okay.

So he'd just had a mostly civil conversation with Emperor _vrekking_ Zarkon, and no one had ended up maimed or dead. That was... that was good. That was _weird_.

He was so done with Oriande.

* * *

Pidge felt a tug in their core as Green drove the false Lion into the ground, then broke away from the battle. Their ankle was throbbing now, sharp stabs of pain slicing through their concentration at odd intervals, but they and Ryner had made it to an elevator in an intact section of the base. It whisked them upward, lights flickering, and Pidge only prayed it held out until they reached the surface. They'd already been crushed by a collapsing building; they didn't need to top that with a fall down an elevator shaft.

They felt Green drawing closer, saw the ruined base rushing by through Green's eyes. Almost the same instant they emerged from the elevator with Ryner, Green came crashing through the roof at the far end of the hanger.

"Quickly," Ryner said, not that Pidge needed the encouragement. They hobbled along, grunting each time their injured foot came down, or their toe caught on the ground, and they leaned more and more heavily on Ryner with each passing second.

Green dropped her head as they approached, but the angle of the ramp proved too much for Pidge's wrecked ankle and they finally toppled, nearly pulling Ryner down with them. She grunted, straining to steady them, and Green obligingly closed the ramp to make the floor a little more level.

It was still a struggle to drag themself to the cockpit, even with Ryner’s help, and the false Lion slammed into Green just as they got a hand on the pilot seat. The floor tilted, and Pidge staggered as Ryner fell away. They screamed in pain, hunching over as they rode out the aftershocks of the impact. They took their weight off their injured leg and bit down on their lip as a whimper tried to rip itself out of them, but they couldn't focus enough to move until Ryner reappeared at their side, a hand on their back to ground them.

"Here," she said. "Sit."

Pidge did so, tears prickling at their eyes as the sharp stabs of pain faded to a rolling ache. Ryner took her seat to Pidge's right, already pulling up screens that burned too bright, with lines of text that made Pidge's head spin. (Diagnostics. She must be looking at diagnostics. Probably smart, considering Green had been tangling with the other lion for a good five or ten minutes by now.)

 _Breathe,_ they ordered themself. _Ignore_ _t_ _he pain. You need to get out of here or you're all toast._

Berating themself didn't make the pain go away, but it did get their arms moving, reaching out for the controls as Green gathered her strength, ready to take flight. An alert blared, signaling the false Lion's return, and that meant there was no more time for self-pity. Pidge punched it, gritting their teeth as they braced against the inertia.

The false Lion sailed by underneath them, crashing into the hangar and leaving another long trail of rubble in its wake. From the sky, Pidge could finally see the extent of the wreckage: whole wings of the base trampled into dust, craters gouged in the rock beyond the walls, and a deep, dark hole where the stairwell had collapsed.

"Fucking robeasts," Pidge said. They were in agony, they were scared out of their mind, and the image of their dad drugged and helpless still made them want to run home to their mom and cry--but there was no time for any of that now. Right now, they needed to survive, and that meant smashing Haggar's Green Lion-knockoff into spare parts.

With a roar, they wheeled Green around, unleashing a salvo of lasers on the false Lion as it picked itself up from the rubble. Its head snapped up, and it threw itself to the side, dodging lasers. Ryner joined in with the tail cannon, hemming it in, and Pidge's next blast caught it square in the back, driving it down into the rubble.

When the light faded, the false Lion's shield glowed faintly red, an unfamiliar insignia traced in cobweb-thin lines of light. Pidge's stomach dropped to the floor, and they cursed, throwing the boosters into reverse as the false Lion twisted, its jaw dropping wide.

Lightning lit up the sky, wrapping around the Green Lion, and Pidge's vision whited out. Green howled in pain, and Pidge struggled just to breathe as they flew blind, trying to outrun the attack. Fire carved channels through their body, mapping their overstimulated nerves. Too much. It was too much.

They broke free eventually, but Pidge couldn't have said if they'd escaped, or if the false Lion had simply run out of power. Either way, the damage had already been done. The screens flickered, Green moaned, and Pidge struggled to hold them steady as tremors wracked their body.

"What the hell?" they breathed, blinking away the dark spots that swarmed their vision. "No fair! That's the LOKI-- _I built that!_ She can't just steal my tech!"

"I hardly think Haggar cares about patents," Ryner said dryly. Her voice was even more strained than before, but she swiped through diagnostics, rerouting power away from nonessential systems until Green stabilized. " _Irrum._ That blast fried our comms."

"Screw the comms."

" _Pidge_ ," Ryner snapped. "We cannot fight this thing alone. If we can't call for backup, we need to get out of here--now."

Pidge glared at her, simultaneously flooding the bond with their rage. "These people took my dad, and now they're trying to destroy any clues that might point me to where they took him. I'm not just going to run away!"

Ryner started to argue, but Pidge ignored her. The false Lion was airborne once more, its tail lashing from side to side as it watched Green, two predators vying for territory.

With a defiant roar, Pidge dove back into the fray.

* * *

"Ohhh, this is bad. This is definitely bad." Aneta paced at the mouth of the small courtyard she'd herded the group into, running her hands through her hair. They were the only ones here at the moment, hidden from the crowd out on the main road, and the ambient noise of the city had faded to a dull roar.

Val shivered, feeling like she’d stumbled into an employees-only area. Nothing looked any different than the markets and the museums, but it felt different. It felt less real, somehow. "How bad can it be? You've got copies of yourself all over the city. Can't one of them find Matt and bring him back here?"

Aneta's lips pursed, and she looked over at Val like she wanted to snap and was only maintaining civility by a narrow margin. "Well, obviously none of my past selves ran into him, otherwise I'd already know about it, and my future selves have their own tasks. If they get assigned to find _your_ friend, that means one of the higher-ups found out, which means I'm going to be in deep quiznak when I report in tonight."

"Then...should _we_ go look for him?" Edi asked. "He can't have gotten far."

"He could have gotten far. He could have gotten _very_ far!" Aneta stopped, paling. "Oh, quiznak, what if he found the--" She shut her mouth with a click.

Val glanced at Edi. "The... what?"

"Nothing you need to worry about," Aneta snapped. She stopped herself, breathing deeply a few times, then plastered on a smile that didn't come close to the one she'd worn for the rest of the morning. "No, it's fine. Someone would have stopped him before he got out there. I'm sure it's fine. We should... We should retrace our steps. Maybe he just got distracted by something along the way."

Something like the other paladins, maybe. Val didn't know whether to be irritated at Matt for running off or mad at herself for not thinking of it first. There was a story to be found with the old paladins, and following them might be the only way to learn it. Sure, that would mean breaking the laws of Oriande, but after the way today had gone so far, Val wasn't feeling particularly charitable towards the establishment.

"We're not going back."

Allura's voice was hard, her posture a clear warning that she was inches away from snapping. Val cringed at the sight, deciding that maybe it was a good thing she hadn't gone spying, after all. Crossing Oriande was one thing, but pissing off Allura? Val didn't envy Matt the tongue-lashing he was in for whenever he got back.

"I'm sorry?" Aneta asked, bristling. "We can't just leave him to wander the city unsupervised."

"Fine. Then go look for him. I will be continuing on to the temple to ask my Question so I can go home."

Her tone, so flat and unyielding, was a stark change from the Allura Val had gotten to know these last six months. Hell, the only time Val had seen her like this was when she was squaring off with the bigwigs from New Altea over the budding alliance. This was Allura locking down all her emotions to focus on the goal she'd set out for herself--and God help anyone who decided to get in her way.

Val scratched her neck, where her poncho was rubbing at her skin. "I mean... There is a good chance Matt is going to make his way there, anyway. He knows that's where we're headed."

Allura nodded curtly, then turned on her heel to search for the temple roof in the distance. They'd already caught a few glimpses of it as they walked, so they had a pretty good idea where they were going. And Val stood by her reasoning. Their best bet for finding Matt without launching a city-wide search probably was to head for the temple.

Fortunately, Aneta saw the sense in that suggestion and relented, wrapping her arms around herself as she led them on. It was a silent, cheerless procession, far removed from how they'd started the day--and a notable dark spot on what otherwise looked like any other tourist trap full of gawking travelers. When they finally reached the foot of the temple stairs half an hour later, Val couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief.

"What now?" Edi asked, leaning around Allura to follow other pilgrims' progress up the steps and into the temple.

"Now, if you are ready, one of the attendants here can show you to one of the viewing rooms." Aneta spoke quickly and in a clipped voice, rattling off her speech like she'd given the same one many times before. “You may all go together, or any of you may request privacy when you ask your Question; that is up to you. Keep your Questions quick and direct. If you have any doubts that the Question you have in mind may be rejected by the sage, you may ask me or the assistant who escorts you. In the event that the sage rejects your Question, you will be allowed to ask another, but you will have a limited time in which to consider it."

Val raised her hand, interrupting Aneta. "While we're on the subject--is it just knowledge of the future we're not allowed to ask about? Like, if we wanted to learn something about the present that we couldn't otherwise know, or we want something that can help us in the future without spoiling anything, is that okay?"

Aneta narrowed her eyes. "Ordinarily, I'd say yes, but I'm afraid you'll try to take advantage of it."

"Well then, what sorts of things do people usually ask for?" Edi asked.

"This and that." Aneta twisted her wrist as though brushing off the question. "A great many people are looking for knowledge of long lost civilizations, or the wisdom of scattered scholars. Facts that are already known, somewhere, by your point in the timeline or opinions of those already dead are generally considered safe. The sages can also give you viewings or documents if we have them available, if they are not considered dangerous to the flow of cause and effect, and if your Question cannot be sufficiently answered in a few minutes."

Val cocked her head to the side. "Viewings?"

"Visions, in a sense," Aneta said. "The viewing rooms are imbued with a certain kind of magic that allows the sages to open a window onto any point in history nearly anywhere in the universe. They may decide to allow you to view events, according to your Question, but in a way that does not allow you to interact with the moment you see."

"Huh," Val said, rolling her lip between her teeth. That did open up quite a few more possibilities. She wasn't sure how much use a vision would be--it would depend too much on which moment the sage decided to show her--but documents might be nice. She wondered what sort of documents the sages had available, and which they would be willing to share.

Somehow, though, she thought Aneta might take that question as suspicious.

So Val waited until the temple assistant came to fetch them, Aneta remaining behind in case Matt did find his way here. The assistant was an older Altean, with hair that Val would have called salt-and-pepper except it was navy blue with periwinkle flecks. His _glaes_ were every bit as elaborate as those of the two Alteans who had welcomed the paladins to Oriande, which made Val wonder if _glaes_ ordinarily expanded over time. Coran's weren't any more extensive than Allura's, so probably not, right? Maybe it was something about the magic that had turned this city into a time loop.

The man couldn't tell them much about the documents they had available. There were too many of them, apparently, and he only fetched the ones that were set aside for a particular group of pilgrims. The librarians would know more about what all the archives held. From what he'd seen, though, it sounded like they were mostly personal accounts of other pilgrims, notes from Oriande scholars who reviewed history in viewing rooms like the one they were headed for, and occasional files copied from what pilgrims carried with them when they came here.

So much for finding tactical files from Zarkon's inner circle.

The viewing room was small and plain--surprisingly so considering how many sculptures and tapestries they'd passed to get here. The temple was clearly the crown jewel of Oriande, and Val could only imagine how much work had gone into dressing it up like this.

This room, though, looked a little bit like the star map projection chambers on the castle-ship. It had a high ceiling and a control panel by the door that Val couldn't decipher, but otherwise it was blank. No furniture, no windows, not even any moulding around the ceiling. Just flat white in all directions.

Allura's face tightened when they walked in, but she closed her eyes, breathed in through her nose, and went to stand stiffly in the center of the room.

"Sage Ellorn will be with you shortly," the assistant said, bowing his head. "I will remain outside in case you have need of anything while you wait."

He lingered another three seconds, then retreated, closing the door behind him.

Val blew out a long breath, meandering around the edge of the room and trying not to look at Allura. Edi didn't even bother with the effort and just sidled up to Allura, looking a little sad and a little uneasy.

"Allura? Are you okay?"

Allura blinked, looking down at Edi, and flushed. She turned away, but that ended up meaning she was looking at Val, who offered a sympathetic smile.

With a sigh, Allura sagged. "I'm fine, Edi. Sorry to worry you. This place just makes me uncomfortable."

"Me too," Val said. "Too much red tape and secrecy. It's like being back at the Garrison." She shivered, and now it was Allura giving Val a sympathetic look. Val straightened up, trying to give off a more optimistic vibe. "But, hey, after this we can go home."

"Finally," Edi muttered.

Allura rubbed her forehead. "Assuming Aneta's managed to locate Matt by the time we're through. I should have gone looking for him. Or at least waited outside until he arrived."

"It's not your fault he ran off like that," Val pointed out. "Waiting wouldn't have necessarily done anything, either. For all we know, Matt's going to show up in a couple of minutes, go ask his Question, and beat us back to Aneta anyway."

"I suppose..."

Val searched for a way to cheer Allura up, but before she could find one the door opened and Sage Ellorn walked in. It was immediately obvious who it was, both because of the gold-embroidered robes with the glowing turquoise crystals sewn into the hems and because their _glaes_ covered their entire face in a pastel green filigree that almost masked the tawny skin underneath. Val knew that she was an unreliable judge of Altean gender presentation, but Ellorn seemed to go out of their way to avoid giving off any particular vibe--broad shouldered, flat-chested, with wide hips; a touch of gold on their lips and thick eyeliner, or something like it. Their gray hair was pulled back into a plain braid.

"Welcome, paladins of Voltron," Ellorn said. "I trust your visit has been... eventful."

Val arched an eyebrow. "What, you been watching us or something?"

They chuckled. "Not exactly. Oriande does like to warn us of those pilgrims that might require a more delicate touch--though as I understand it, you had every reason to react as you did."

Allura looked up, sharp eyes searching their face. Val followed suit, looked for the hook they were trying to set. Oh, they sounded sincere enough, but Val had been here long enough to get a feel for the way Oriande worked. Which was to say, the people here would do or say just about anything to pacify you so you wouldn't go poking at the timestream.

Allura, clearly, had come to the same conclusion, and she only raised an eyebrow in Ellorn's direction.

"Believe me, Princess, none of us _enjoys_ neutrality. The fall of Altea was one of the first things we discovered when we stepped out of time, and most of us spent our early days vying for the sages to step in. I remember being angry that we would allow billions of lives to end when we had the knowledge and the ability to stop it." Ellorn's lip quirked upward. "For a number of days, I conspired with my near-echoes--my other selves from approximately the same time in my life--to leave Oriande and assassinate the ones behind the fall of Altea and all of the other massacres that followed. It is probably for the best that I did not learn of Zarkon's visit to Oriande until my temper had already cooled."

"I dunno," Val said, "I think a lot of people would have thanked you if you _had_ killed him."

"And many others would have died to save those lives. Even if I had somehow managed not to unbalance reality itself by interfering--something that I assure you is a larger threat to sentient life in this universe than Zarkon's entire empire--history would have changed in other ways."

Edi's ears sloped backwards beneath her hood at Ellorn's grim tone. "What do you mean?"

"The universe is… unpredictable. However many villains you defeat, others will rise to fill their shoes. To think that without Zarkon no wars would have been fought in ten thousand years, no campaigns launched to conquer or slaughter. To think that no tyrants would have made a grab for power or extremists riled up chaos... That is an optimistic view of the universe. Some would even call it naive.”

“You don’t know that anyone would have taken Zarkon’s place,” Allura said.

Ellorn shook their head. “Don’t we? I wish it were so. We have seen the universe at it is, and as it nearly was. The Jeun were a race feared across galaxies for their biological warfare and warmongering tendencies among their political elite. Zarkon wiped them out before they could threaten his empire--or anyone else in the universe. Would you trade the Galra Empire for the Jeun Empire that might have been?"

Stomach churning, Val shook her head. "We're not talking about what the Jeun might have done. We're talking about what Zarkon absolutely _did_ do."

"Yes." Ellorn held up their hands. "And I do not mean to diminish the evil he has wrought. Only to point out that you cannot change history on a whim and expect things to work out in your favor. The universe is far more complex than that, and change is best left to those who are in the thick of it."

"And I suppose you bear no responsibility, even though you're the only ones who could hope to prevent the worst of what is to come," Allura said.

Ellorn's shoulders rose and fell in a sigh. "No. We bear too much responsibility, which is why we allow none but the wisest and most experienced to interfere, even in small ways."

Val made a curious noise. "So... you do interfere, then?"

"Why else would we allow pilgrims to come here, where all of history is on display, and ask questions? I will be frank with you, paladins, because I know the gravity of your fight. We are more generous with those who come seeking a way to stop great evil than with those who seek only personal gain. We will give _you_ more aid than we give someone like Haggar."

A jolt of alarm raced through Val, and she shot a frantic look at Allura. "Haggar's been here?"

"Three times," Ellorn said. "We barred her or those she has touched from ever returning after the last time, as she grew too cautious in wording her Questions, leaving us less room to give her useless information."

A wry smile twisted Ellorn's face as Val gaped at them.

"Just because we cannot risk attacking the Empire directly does not mean we are eager to aid it. But enough chatter. You all have Questions to ask."

"Yes," Allura said slowly. "Though I suppose you've already answered mine, at least in part."

"Oh?"

Allura hesitated, then squared her shoulders, a stubborn slant coming back to her jaw. "I don't understand why Oriande exists. If what you say is true, and meddling with history destabilizes the very fabric of reality, why create a system that could be abused? Why allow anyone to come here at all if you're so worried about keeping secrets? It seems like an awfully big risk just to pass along a few careful hints."

The back wall of the room rippled, changing from pure white to deep black, and then to the shimmering blue of a wormhole. It swirled for a moment as Ellorn began to talk.

"You are correct. I doubt the First Sages would have created Oriande simply for the sake of the pilgrims. I dare say they would be horrified to realize what we have done with their gift. Unlike us, they caught only brief, clouded glimpses of the future. They had no idea of the darkness waiting beyond their sight."

The image on the wall cleared, blue light retreating until it framed the scene playing out: an alien forest wreathed in thick mist, so vivid Val felt as though she could reach straight through the wall and snatch a leaf off the nearest branch. She might have tried, except she found herself transfixed as a shimmering pink creature broke from the trees, aquamarine blood dripping down its leg. Allura sucked in a sharp breath.

"The perekotha," Ellorn said. "The First Kotha, by some translations. They were the ancestors of the kotha who once lived on Altea. They were a wise species, even more so than the kotha you would have known. The kotha were intelligent, even sapient, creatures, but the perekotha were far more so—wielders of great magic, patrons of travelers and civilizations, extremely long-lived and benevolent. There were never a great many of them in the universe, but it was Altea's friendship with the perekotha that sparked our people's technological growth. Our sages traveled far to seek the knowledge of the perekotha and bring it back to our people. But not all had the patience for friendship."

The scene played on, no longer following the perekotha as it fled but showing the hunter who stalked it. He was Altean, and as Val watched, he raised an energy rifle, sighted through the scope, and shot the fleeing perekotha. It fell, disappearing into the foliage, and the hunter smiled.

"Perekotha were revered in most of the universe for their knowledge, but certain circles coveted their hides, which would eventually lead to the development of artificial cloaking, and for their blood, which is itself among the most potent forms of Quintessence in the universe. Hunters--assassins--killed the perekotha one at a time, drained them of blood, skinned them, then sold the bones as novelties and the flesh as a rare delicacy. This continued until the perekotha were all but extinct."

Ellorn paused, and the scene of the hunter faded as he went to collect his prize. On the right wall, another window appeared, this one showing a building that must have been the old temple, back when Oriande was just a small retreat on a moon somewhere. Some of the carvings were the same, as were the robes worn by the people shuffling about.

Five sages--Val assumed they were sages, considering the way everyone else bowed as they approached, though their robes were no more elaborate than anyone else's--walked across a courtyard, a pure white perekotha accompanying them. It stood as tall as any of the Alteans, and its mouth moved as though it were speaking, though no sound came from the image.

“That...” Allura tore her eyes away from the viewing to stare at Ellorn. “I have seen this perekotha before. In the empty space I was taken to after… after I came too close to breaking the laws of Oriande.”

Ellorn blinked. “Did you? Count yourself blessed. The spirit of Voltron approaches only a very few visitors to our city.”

“Voltron?” Val asked, feeling a little breathless. “You mean _our_ Voltron? It was—they were…? They were a real person?”

Ellorn’s eyes drifted back to the viewing, which had continued during their distraction. "I was a young acolyte when the last perekotha came to Oriande. I don't remember much, but I know she sought aid from the sages. The other perekotha, fearing for their lives, had... well, there are a great many legends that attempt to explain what, exactly they did, and even I'm not entirely sure. The general consensus is that they discarded their physical bodies and retreated to the astral realm, though some say they merely withdrew to some physical place none of the hunters could follow."

The perekotha said something that made the sages stop and stare, but after a moment they gathered themselves and the entire group disappeared through a door on the far side of the courtyard.

"I don't know if that perekotha knew that the universe was going to need Voltron, or if she only feared what others might create with the perekotha blood that had been harvested from her kin; many of her own memories were lost when Oriande was cordoned off from the rest of the universe. Regardless, she and the First Sages devised a plan. She taught the sages, along with your great-grandmother, how to build the vessels—what you now call the Voltron Lions--and sacrificed a piece of herself to grant them sentience. In return, the sages made Oriande timeless to protect the remaining fragments of her spirit both from hunters and from the simple passage of time. For her sake, as well as Voltron’s."

A third wall lit up, this one showing the temple again, but this time set below the pastel rainbow clouds of Oriande as it was now. For an instant, Val saw the forest moon overlaid with the clouds, the First Sages standing in a ring around the perekotha.

Then the sages and the forest vanished, and the glow flared bright enough that Val had to shield her eyes. When it cleared, the perekotha was gone and in her place were five slightly smaller kotha in familiar colors. The blue kotha turned, and for a moment Val swore she was looking through the portal straight at Val.

"To answer your question, then," Ellorn said, "Oriande was created so that Voltron might exist. The last perekotha imbued each of the First Sages with a fragment of her soul, causing her spirit in this place to manifest as five distinct beings: the kotha spirits that inhabit your lions. The kotha do not age; they, like Oriande itself, reset each night. They, like us, can look out onto any point in history--and because they exist simultaneously in each of them, in the form of the lions, they are able to interfere more directly than we can. Your lions are not fully aware of their kotha spirits, but they can communicate in times of great need, or when the kotha deliberately reach out."

Allura looked shaken, her eyes shining with tears. "Is that why the lions are able to see potential futures for those they choose as paladins?"

"Not _potential_ futures," Ellorn said softly. "But yes. The kotha sometimes impress upon the lions who it is they should take as their paladins. That is how the lions found your team, against all odds. The kotha pointed them in the right direction when it became necessary."

Val suddenly wished there was a chair in here so she could sit down and sort through the spinning in her head. An ancient race of near-immortals, a genocide carried out by the same people the perekotha had helped, and some weird ritual that had split Voltron in five. (Well that, at least, made sense. It always felt so natural when they formed Voltron, like it was always meant to be that way—because it was. She was.) "So... Oriande is what it is in order to let Voltron even exist."

"Essentially, yes." Ellorn stared at the second panel, the one that showed the temple on the forest moon. "I do not believe the First Sages realized we would experience our days sequentially, while the kotha and Oriande reset each night. I believe they meant to slow down time for us, in order to allow the kotha--and therefore Voltron--to outlive an ordinary kotha's lifespan, but only that. Everything else that Oriande has become is this way because we had to find things to do with the rest of our lives. I don't know if it was the ideal choice on our part, but I believe we have done all right with what we were given."

They fell silent, watching Allura process the answer.

"Does that answer your Question?"

Allura nodded, blinking furiously as she stared at the frozen image of the five kotha, new-born at dawn. Val supposed it wasn't a very satisfying answer, but then, there probably wasn't anything that could have made Allura feel better about the run-in with her parents and the other paladins.

She seemed less angry now, at least, and waved to Val and Edi to go on.

"Edi?" Val asked. "You want to go next?"

Edi jumped, glancing from Val to Allura and then to Ellorn. The walls went back to a blank white, and Edi shrank in on herself. "Um... My Question isn’t really as important as Princess Allura’s. I was just kinda wondering if I should keep going with the stuff Fligg tried to teach me. The magic? I dunno if Galra can even learn it. I mean... there are the druids, but I don't know if that's different or what..."

Ellorn smiled, resting a hand on her shoulder. "Keep at it. It will be a longer road for you than for most people, but it _is_ possible for a Galra to learn magic. In fact... just a moment." They opened the door and leaned out into the corridor to say something to the assistant outside. "Thank you," they said, returning with sheaf of papers. "These notes were donated by another pilgrim we had come through here, a charming woman named Tenlok. She started life as a druid but broke with the Empire as a youth. Very accomplished with magic--primarily druidic, yes, but she made a study of several other forms of magic and incorporated them into her craft. If anyone can teach you how to access your Quintessence, it's Tenlok."

Edi's eyes widened, and she snatched the papers out of Ellorn's hand, beginning to look through them immediately, never mind that she was still speaking with a sage of Oriande. Val had to give her points for enthusiasm, though.

Then it was Val's turn, and her heart began to pound at once. She licked her lips, running over the wording of her Question once more in her head. She wasn't as worried now about the sage dodging the question like some kind of fey, but she still didn't want to accidentally waste this chance, either.

"My friends and I are searching for people who are very dear to us," she said slowly. "Family, and close friends who might as well be family. Is there a way to find them--not to find hints of them and follow that, but to actually find _them_ , directly?"

"Interesting," Ellorn said. "You wish to know how to find them, rather than simply asking where they are?"

Val lifted one shoulder, avoiding Allura's gaze. "Well, I mean... You can move a prisoner easy, and the Galra have been getting intel from the castle-ship, right? I don't want to risk it."

"Fair enough." Ellorn considered it for a moment, their eyes going unfocused as they stared at the wall, as though looking at a viewing the others couldn't see. "There may be something. It is not a ready-made solution, but with some practice, it should have the effect you're hoping for."

They opened the door once more, and this time the assistant was ready, handing two books through the door almost before Ellorn spoke. The sage offered their thanks, then handed the books to Val. It was strange to see them in a place like Oriande. Everything Val had seen of the Alteans said they preferred digital files over pretty much anything physical. Paper was hard to find on the castle-ship, and Val honestly didn't think she'd ever seen a book besides the ones the paladins' families had brought from Earth.

Val turned the books sideways to read the titles off the spines. " _Manifestations of Quintessence_ and _Quintessence Theory, DVE._ " She looked up. "DVE?"

"Internal notation," Ellorn said. "Just so we don't accidentally hand you secrets that won't be discovered for another ten thousand years. Or information that isn't accurate yet, for that matter."

Allura blinked slowly, looking like she was trying not to shudder at Ellorn's words. "I'm sorry, but are you implying that the foundational workings of Quintessence are not fixed?"

"Things happen," Ellorn said with what Val would have called an impish grin, had it been anyone but a sage of Oriande standing before her. "Most of them not in your lifetime, so try not to worry about it too much." They turned back to Val. "In any case, you should find what you're looking for in there. That's information our scholars have compiled. Not exactly light reading, I'm sure, but I have no doubt you'll figure it out in time."

"In time for _what?_ " Val asked.

Ellorn only smiled. "In time for when it's needed."

"No pressure, though." Val eyed the books suspiciously. They didn't look that intimidating; certainly nothing like some of the bricks on Sebastian's bookshelf (and her own, if she was being fair, but at least her bricks were of the epic fantasy and space opera variety.) And here she'd thought she was done with homework. “You sure you can’t give me a hint or something?”

“You will be the first to accomplish what you’re trying to do,” Ellorn said. “Which means you’re going to have to figure it out for yourself. The universe doesn’t like shortcuts.”

Val narrowed her eyes at them, gauging their sincerity. “If you say so.”

“I do. In any case, I think that about does it for you three, yes?"

Allura rubbed her ear, looking vaguely disgruntled. "I suppose so. We ought to go find Matt."

"Then I will leave you to your lives." Ellorn bowed their head. "I don't believe we shall ever meet again, so allow me to thank you for all you have done and will do for the universe."

Val hugged her books to her chest, feeling suddenly bashful. "Uh, you're welcome? I guess? Thanks for the, uh, the books."

"Thanks," Edi echoed, with considerably more cheer. Allura just nodded something that might have been a thanks. Ellorn led the way out of the viewing room, then retreated deeper into the temple while the assistant led them back to the steps out front.

Val braced herself for another long, tense march across the city in search of Matt, but to her surprise he was waiting with Aneta when they arrived. Whatever it was he'd run off to do, it didn't seemed to have improved his mood any; he sat on the steps with his hands dangling between his knees, worry lining his face as he stared out over the city.

He turned at their approach, stiffened as soon as he locked eyes with Allura, then hastily turned back around.

"I'm..." He cleared his throat, wiping his palms on his legs. "I'm sorry for running off on you like that.."

"It's fine." Allura sounded tired--far too tired to bother with anger, and Matt risked another look at her. "You should go ask your Question so we can get going. I'd rather not spend another hour here if I can help it."

Matt stood, tucking his hands under his arms. "I'm all finished, actually. One of the sages spotted me when I got here and did the whole viewing room shtick on the spot. I ran into Aneta on my way out."

Val cocked her head to the side. "Oh? So what did you ask?"

Flinching, Matt ran his hands down his face. "That's... a really long story, and probably not one I should tell while we walk." His eyes flickered, for a moment, to Allura, and Val recognized pain in his eyes. "Let's get back to the ship, and then I'll tell you everything. I promise."

* * *

Pidge grunted as another laser slammed into the Green Lion, throwing her sideways and rattling both her pilots. Pidge lifted their mangled foot off the floor to try to spare it, but there was only so much they could do. Gritting their teeth, they twisted Green so the laser hit the shield instead, charging her power reserves. They looped back around, discharging the LOKI directly in the false Lion's face.

It didn't have nearly as much of an impact as they'd hoped, and though it bought them a few seconds to get some breathing room, the false Lion was back on them in seconds.

"Pidge!" Ryner scrambled to silence the alarm that had just sounded--the fifth one so far, or maybe the sixth; Pidge had stopped counting. "We _cannot_ stay here. We need to get back to the others and regroup. We'll come at this as a team."

Pidge pushed back against the idea of retreat, slamming down a mental wall as Green chimed in to back up Ryner. Green rumbled in discontent, but there was no time to get into it, not with the false Lion shooting off blast after blast, trying to hem them in against the lip of a crater.

Twisting, Pidge spiraled under the barrage, and Green hip-checked the false Lion on her way to open sky. A laser slammed them from behind, and the sound of shrieking metal grated on Pidge's nerves.

**Go.**

The word appeared in blocky letters on Pidge's screen, and they lobbed a few wordless complaints in Green's direction. They'd stopped listening to her nagging for a _reason_ , and blocking their view of the battle wasn't helping anything. Green remained stubbornly silent, but threw up another message on the screen beneath the first.

**You need to go, Pidge.**

Pidge opened their mouth to argue, but another wave of lightning enveloped Green, putting Pidge's thoughts temporarily on hold as pain took over.

When it faded, it left Pidge breathing hard, their hands shaking so much it was all but impossible to fly straight. Green gave them a silent nudge, pleading with them to listen to reason, and Pidge--

Pidge suddenly realized that Ryner was wheezing, having to try several times to select the menu she wanted, as though she couldn't get her eyes to focus. Green was hurting too, pouring everything into her engines and her particle barrier to try to protect her paladins, but the false Lion had hit her hard several times now. She couldn't take much more punishment before something broke.

Fighting back tears, Pidge twisted in midair, looking back toward the ruins of the lab and prison. "There's nothing else to find here, is there?" they whispered. "Haggar already wiped it all clean."

"Probably," Ryner said. She was too winded to say more, but Pidge felt her cautious reassurance in the bond. _It'll be okay, Pidge. We'll find him. Somehow._

Pidge wasn't so sure, but staying here was only going to get them all killed. So they dodged the false Lion's next salvo, then took off across the surface of this asteroid, dodging craters and mountains and using them as cover where they could. There was a sharp ridge along the underside of the asteroid, as though a chunk had broken off. Pidge dove behind this ridge, blocking the false Lion's line of sight for a split second, and immediately changed direction, shooting out perpendicular to the surface. They opened up the thrusters, putting as much distance behind them as they dared before they opened a wormhole and plunged in.

The instant they emerged on the other side, they pulled back hard, looping around over the top of the wormhole and opening a second one behind it. They flew farther after this one, dropping behind a nearby moon and reducing power output to near nothing. For a few breathless moments they waited, just to be sure the false Lion wasn't going to follow them. The air remained clear, the cockpit silent except for Ryner’s labored breathing and the low chirping of alarms.

After a moment, Pidge relaxed, then finally opened a wormhole back to the castle.

Their ankle was more than just throbbing by now, the pain cresting every few seconds and making them lock up. Ryner quietly took over as they came in for a landing, which was probably for the best because holy _shit_ that hurt. They focused on breathing, trying to ride out the pain, and clutched the armrests of their chair until their knuckles hurt.

They didn't even register setting down in the hangar, and only Ryner's hand on their shoulder dragged their attention back to the rest of the world.

"Ryner," they said, hating how their breath hitched. "That was a lion."

"Shhh. Sit tight," Ryner said. "I called Coran. He and your mother are already on their way. We'll get you up to medical and fix you up."

"Forget about me! Zarkon has a--" Pidge made the mistake of trying to stand and screamed as they put weight on their foot. They collapsed, hugging their knee to their chest, and bit down on their lip to keep from screaming again. "Fuck," they breathed. " _Fuck_ , that's broken, isn't it?"

Ryner put a hand on their knee, and they shrank back, tongue tripping over a plea not to touch the ankle--but Ryner didn't seem inclined to do that. She only looked, and her expression was less that encouraging. "It's not good," she said. "But I'm sure it's nothing Coran and the cryopods can't fix. Just breathe."

"I can't," they snapped. "That was a _lion_ , Ryner! That was Green! That was--Zarkon's--"

"Pidge!"

Their mother's voice derailed their thoughts, and they turned, breath leaving them in a rush as Karen barreled into the cockpit, Coran close behind.

"I'm fine," Pidge said quickly, though it probably sounded ridiculous between the freely-flowing tears and a voice that was rough from smoke and dust.

Karen crushed them to her chest, then pulled back just as quickly, scowling at them. "You are _not_ fine, Pidge. You've dislocated your ankle."

It wasn't the word dislocated so much as the matter-of-fact way she said it that made Pidge sick to their stomach, but either way they glanced toward their ankle. Their boot was in bad shape--cracked and dented where it had been pinned, and their foot still hung limp from the ankle. Their entire leg throbbed with each heartbeat, it was definitely swollen, and they were not looking forward to getting that boot off.

Karen cursed, then caught Coran's eye. He pulled a small metal disc out of his belt and pressed a button that turned it into a floating stretcher. Between the two of them, Karen and Coran got Pidge settled on the stretcher, and they were halfway to the elevator by the time Pidge remembered what it was they were going to say.

They sat bolt upright, cursing as the motion made the stretcher waver in midair, and twisted, reaching out for their mother's wrist.

"Mom," they said. "I think Zarkon's building his own Voltron."

* * *

Matt hardly paid attention as the group made their way back to the welcome center where they'd arrived on Oriande. He knew he should tell Allura about the viewing the sage had given him—about her parents, about Zarkon, and about the start of this whole war. Of all people, Allura deserved to know the truth--but his head was still spinning, his stomach twisting each time his thoughts pulled back that way, and if he tried to talk about it now, he thought he might just be sick.

Once they were away from here. Once they were away, he would tell her. It would probably be a disaster, but they could deal with it back on the ship, on the way back to the castle, where they didn't have an entire extra-temporal city mocking them with its very existence.

Matt still couldn't tell whether coming here had actually done them any good.

Rhoal and Riala were waiting for them once more in the room where they'd received their orientation. It couldn't have been more than five or six hours since then--from the local frame of reference--but it had probably been longer than that outside the city, and Matt felt like he'd lived every second of that time.

"Did you find what you were looking for?" Rhoal asked, all cheerful and innocent, while Riala just folded her hands at her waist.

Matt glared at them both, and Allura glared at the far wall. Val and Edi, at least, seemed like they'd found the experience moderately rewarding. They'd received books and papers, if nothing else, and they both looked like they couldn't wait to get away from here so they could start reading. That was something.

"I think we all just want to go home," Val said. "Thanks for... Thanks for the hospitality, I guess, but frankly? The sooner you get us back to that tower, the better."

Rhoal blinked, face crumpling. "Of course. But perhaps we could offer you one last courtesy? Perhaps you would prefer to return to the castle directly, rather than the tower on Roya Vosar."

Matt's head snapped up. "You can--?" His voice broke on an unexpected surge of relief, but it didn't look like he was alone in the sentiment. Even Allura looked hopeful.

Rhoal's smile turned sad. "Of course. We are selective about who we let in, out of necessity, but the barriers are somewhat lower when you're coming from this side. Oriande is no closer to any point in the physical universe, and you all are already tied to the Castle of Lions. It’s the least we can do."

They knew. Matt’s heart clenched at the thought, but he couldn’t shake it. The sorrow in Rhoal’s eyes, the way Riala wouldn’t even look at them. They’d known what Matt and his friends would find in Oriande, and they hadn’t said anything.

Of course they hadn’t. That would mean risking the balance of the universe itself.

Val managed a smile for the Alteans, but Matt was too tired to even make the attempt. He just nodded, then went to stand where Riala indicated. She joined hands with Rhoal, and their _glaes_ began to glow. Matt squinted against the currents of Quintessence in the air, then shut his eyes altogether as the world went white.

When he opened his eyes again, he was standing in the Blue Lion's hangar. Val jumped, spinning around as Blue let out a purr like thunder. Somewhere nearby, Matt felt Red startle out of her own slumber, reaching out for Matt like a puppy greeting its owner for the first time in a month. (Red bristled at the comparison, but she forgot her irritation a moment later as her attention wheeled around and went to rope Keith into the excitement.)

Matt smiled as Keith's shock jolted through him, but shock was followed soon after by a complicated mix of worry, relief, and urgency that put Matt on edge. From the looks on the others' faces, they'd been presented with a similar barrage of emotions. Matt hurried over to the comms station on the wall, only to hesitate as he realized he didn't know where Keith was. Should he just call the bridge?

Before he could decide, an incoming call appeared on the display, and Matt tapped the screen to accept it. Akira's face filled the screen, his brow furrowed for an instant before he saw Matt.

"It _is_ you. Good."

Matt frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Akira waved his hand. "Half the room just went glassy-eyed like the lions suddenly yanked their minds to something more important. Considering the Greens and Yellows weren't affected, I figured you guys might be back." He paused. "It... _is_ all of you, right?"

"It's all of us," Val said, coming up behind Matt with Allura and Edi in tow. "What's going on? Lance seems a little..."

Akira closed his eyes. "Everyone's fine."

Matt's stomach dropped. "That's not as reassuring as it sounds."

"Yeah..." Akira rubbed the back of his neck, glancing over his shoulder. "You guys should come up to the med bay. There was a run-in with a robeast, I think? Part of the building collapsed, and Pidge messed up their ankle--"

Matt didn't stay to hear the rest of Akira's report. He took off at a sprint, his heart in his throat. All he could hear was _Pidge, robeast,_ and _building collapse,_ and that painted entirely too vivid a picture. Oriande and all that it entailed seemed a much less pressing concern in the face of an injured Pidge.

How bad was it? Akira had mentioned their ankle, but surely if there was anything really serious, like--like a punctured lung, or a broken spine, or a head injury-- _anything_ \--Akira would have lead with that. Right? Matt cursed himself for not staying to hear all the details, but he was already in the elevator, bouncing on his toes as the floors ticked away.

He squeezed out as soon as the door started to open, careening toward the med bay. Akira was waiting outside, his hands up in a calming gesture.

"Breathe?" he suggested. "Breathe. I did lead with _everyone's fine,_ remember."

"Where's Pidge?"

Akira sighed, but hit the door controls, ushering Matt into the chaos. It looked like the entire team was here, or at least most of it. Some of them were gathered by the walls or had retreated into the pod room next door to leave room for Coran and Shay to work. The two of them bustled around one of the exam beds, where Pidge was lying down, still dressed in battered paladin armor except for their left leg, which was bare from the knee down.

Bare and darkened with bruises and a few streaks of blood, all swollen and _wrong_ in a way that turned Matt’s stomach.

Ryner and Matt's mother sat by their head on either side of the exam table, Karen offering her hand as a stress ball, Ryner smoothing back their hair as Coran reviewed scans at the computer terminal nearby.

"--don't need a fucking pod, Coran, I'm fine!" Pidge was shouting, though the obvious pain in their voice betrayed them. "I'm more worried about the goddamn Dark _fucking_ Voltron that's floating around out there!"

"Pidge!" Matt cried. It came out a little bit strangled as the phrase _Dark Voltron_ sunk in (there was a story there, and Matt wasn't sure he was prepared to hear it.)

Strangled or no, Matt's voice was enough to silence the conversations in the room as the others turned toward the door. From the corner of his eye, Matt spotted motion that the bond told him was Keith and probably Shiro, but he couldn't take his eyes off Pidge, who tried to sit up when they heard him. Shay quieted them with a hand on their knee, and Ryner quickly surrendered her seat to Matt.

"Hey, Pidgeon," Matt said, grabbing their hand and kissing their knuckles. "How you feeling?"

They wrinkled their nose. "Like I want to be an android so I wouldn't have to deal with excitable little neurons that keep harping on the same damn injury— _fuck!_ " they added at something near a shout as they shifted just enough to jostle their ankle. Coran turned away from the scans and crossed to the bed, offering a sympathetic smile as Pidge hissed at him.

Matt blinked, looking up at his mother, who just shook her head, patted Pidge's hand, and offered Matt a thin smile. "It's been a long day."

"You're telling me."

"I'm going to have to realign your ankle, I'm afraid," Coran said. "It's going to hurt."

"No _fucking_ kidding, Coran."

Matt eyed Coran as he got into position, then decided he'd really rather not watch. He focused instead on Pidge, offering his hand for squeezing so his mother could take a break. (From her wince as she freed her hand, it was long overdue.)

"Ready?" Coran asked.

Pidge drew in a deep breath and squeezed Matt's hand. "Just get it over-- _fuck._ " They squeezed tighter as Coran, with Shay's help, slid the bones back into place.

Then it was over, and Pidge sagged against the pillows, breathing hard. Matt squeezed their hand gently, scooting closer and debating the merits of trying to contort himself to offer better cuddles without jostling. It was probably too much trouble to be worth it, but that didn't mean it wasn't tempting.

"What happened?" he asked, finally looking up at the rest of the room. "Akira said something about a robeast? And what's this about Dark Voltron?"

A sharp intake of breath from the doorway signaled Allura's arrival. Val, Edi, and Akira were close behind, all of them tense. "Dark Voltron?" Allura demanded. “Impossible."

Ryner sighed. "It wasn't a complete Voltron formation we encountered," she admitted. "But the robeast we fought at Renxora appears to have been modeled after the Green Lion."

"Modeled after? Bullshit. It _was_ Green. A perfect copy. Same armor, same design. It moved just like Green. Fought like her, too. It even had auxiliary systems _I_ built. We built," they added sullenly as Ryner arched an eyebrow. "Look, my point is that we already know Zarkon built himself a new Black Lion that's just as strong as the real one. Now he has a Green Lion, too?"

"If the other three aren't already out there, they will be soon," Shiro finished. He looked tired--more tired than he had any right to be, and Matt would have been at his side in a heartbeat if Pidge didn't need him, too. Thankfully Lance was there, pulling away from a hug with Val to lean against Shiro's shoulder.

Lance offered a smile that Shiro echoed, however weakly. "Still," Lance said. "Two lions--or even all five--isn't the same thing as Voltron."

"Lance is right." Allura's voice left no room for argument, but Matt knew her well enough by now to sense the fear she almost managed to hide. "Voltron is far more than just a machine. Our power comes from our bonds--the bonds between paladin and lion, and even more importantly, the bond _among_ paladins. I don't care what monstrosities Haggar has built or how closely they match our lions' capabilities. A robeast simply is not capable of the sort of bond that makes Voltron possible."

It was probably a testament to the sort of day Matt had had that he was so ready to listen to Allura and drop his fears of Zarkon building his own Voltron, but it made sense. Robeasts weren't paladins, and a bunch of ships sticking together to make a bigger ship didn't automatically make that ship a better match for Voltron.

There was nothing to worry about.

God, he hoped there was nothing to worry about.

"All right," Coran said, sitting back with a wry smile. He patted Pidge's uninjured foot once. "You have a no-longer dislocated ankle, but it's best if you spend a spell in a pod."

Pidge wrinkled their nose. "Do I _have_ to?"

"Half a day in the pod or a couple of months off your feet," Coran said, entirely too chipper. "Your choice!"

"Come on, Pidge," Matt said, squeezing their hand, which still hadn't released his. "You know you need it."

"But I haven't seen you in _forever_ ," they protested. "Can't I go in the pod tonight?"

Matt glanced to Coran, who frowned. "I... don't suppose there's any particular danger to postponing the cryocycle. As long as you don't put any weight on that ankle."

"We have floaty chairs, Coran, I'll be fine."

Coran shrugged. "If you’re sure."

He splinted their ankle, using an Altean device that looked more like a particle barrier than anything but effectively immobilized the joint. As Coran finished, Matt turned to find a floaty chair for Pidge, only to find Shiro waiting behind him with one all ready to go. Matt took the chair from Shiro and shoved it at Coran, then flung his arms around Shiro’s neck.

Shiro melted in an instant, wrapping his arms around Matt and pulling him so tight Matt had to go up onto his toes. He smiled, then tilted his head back and drank in the sight of Shiro there, no screens in between them.

"Hey," Matt said. "Been a while."

Shiro laughed, giving him a quick kiss on the lips, then a second on the forehead. "I missed you."

"You too." Matt sagged against his chest, breathing in his scent, and willed the tension out of his body.

"Oriande not a resort getaway, I take it?" Akira asked. He'd taken Pidge's spot on the exam table, now that Pidge was settled in the chair and fiddling with a footrest that was designed for somewhat longer legs. Keith stood a half a step further from Matt, his arms wrapped around himself.

Rolling his eyes, Matt wrestled Keith into a hug, then relented to his mother's own welcome-home ambush and wrinkled his nose at Akira over Karen's shoulder.

"Definitely not a resort. Unless you happen to be a dystopian bureaucrat looking for some red tape to navigate."

Akira gagged. "No thanks."

Matt grinned, then straightened. "Right!" He squeezed his mom one last time, then broke away and smacked Akira's shoulder. "I hear you're our adjunct!"

"Yeah." Akira squinted at Matt, rubbing his shoulder. "Who told you that?"

"I did," Matt said. "From the future."

"That sounds like a story and a half," Hunk said. Val snorted, earning herself a wary look from Nyma and a raised eyebrow from Lance.

Allura had been inching steadily closer to Coran ever since she arrived, and at her heavy sigh, he spared her the trouble of the last two feet and went to pull her into a hug.

"Oriande was a nightmare," she said. "I've never been so glad to leave a place in my life."

"Wow," Lance muttered. "That bad?"

Matt locked eyes with Val. "Yeah," she said. "It was kinda horrible."

"You don’t know the half of it," Matt muttered. The others all turned toward him, and his mouth ran dry. He didn’t want to do this. Not today, and maybe not ever. But he’d promised, and Allura deserved the truth. They all deserved the truth, really. It just sucked that Matt had to play messenger. "We should find somewhere to talk. Better yet, somewhere we can set up the mind-meld. Some of this is... It's better if you see it for yourself."

"Matt," Shiro said slowly. "What's this all about?"

Matt glanced to Keith. "It’s about a lot of things,” he said. “But mostly it’s about Zarkon, King Alfor, and Lealle, and why this war started in the first place.”


	29. Before the War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time: Team Hogwarts finally got to ask their Questions--Allura about the foundation of Oriande, Edi about Galran magic, and Val about a way to find the people the team is looking for. Afterwards, they returned to the castle-ship to find that Pidge and Ryner had just survived a fight with a malicious replica of the Green Lion. After the initial chaos died down, the team went to get the mind-meld device set up so Matt could show them what he learned on Oriande about the start of the war.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your patience, my friends! I've finally got my buffer under control, so we're back to weekly updates as we wrap up the second act of this fic and move on to Act III and the run up to the finale.
> 
> Trigger warnings for this chapter: Nothing super intense (almost everything happens off-screen), but there are quite a few discussions of natural disasters, riots, warfare, and rich/powerful old men being assholes.

A quiet tension hung over the training deck as Coran gave the mind-meld device one final look-over. It had taken a bit of deliberation on the part of several of the castle's residents--though there was a silent understanding that they all would defer to Allura, should she decide this wasn't the sort of thing that needed an audience--but they at last agreed that it would be kinder to include everyone in the first telling, rather than force anyone to relay what by all accounts looked to be quite a lot of pain in the making.

Lealle.

In Coran's memory, she was a kind, bright, cheerful woman, full of energy and always ready with a hug. She was, in many ways, the best of them, and it was her death that hurt Coran the most. Zarkon’s past he knew held only pain. Alfor’s… He’d suspected there was something more there than Coran had been privy to. But he couldn't fathom what Matt might have seen, heard, or been told about Lealle that Coran didn’t already know. She’d never been one to hide how she felt.

The fact that it was Allura’s parents on trial here, so to speak, cast a pall over the room. They'd limited the audience to the paladins and adjuncts--those most directly affected by Voltron's history--but that was still fourteen people arranged on chairs and cushions or on the floor. Matt and Keith stuck close together, Keith evidently having some inkling what was running through Matt's head. Shiro and Akira flanked the red paladins, one on either side. They hovered close, trading worried looks, but made no move to touch or talk to them. (Shiro had tried that a few times already, with Matt, and had been met with nothing but noncommittal grunts.)

Allura sat on Shiro's other side, her knees pulled up close to her chest and her arms wrapped around them. She was watching Matt closely, her expression carefully blank, but Coran didn't need to be her adjunct to feel the fear radiating off of her. She’d idolized her parents, and even if she’d begun to doubt her father in recent months, Coran doubted she’d ever really stopped believing him a hero.

"This should be all set," Ryner said. Even her low tone was enough to cut through the expectant silence, and Coran couldn't help cringing as several pairs of eyes turned their way.

The thing about the mind-meld was that it really was only meant to merge five minds at a time. One complete team of paladins--or what had been considered a complete team at the time the device was built. The current paladins had only used it in pairs since the team expanded, and Coran certainly didn't want to try their luck with a full fourteen minds at once. As such, he and Ryner had modified the settings for a partial mind-meld. A mind-projection, really. Ryner had recruited the Green Lion for help, and they'd brought in the psychic networking capabilities of the translation program to include the entire group in the link, but only Matt's thoughts would be projected.

Coran glanced at the results of the calibration, then squared his shoulders. "All right," he said. "We're ready."

Allura came out of her shell at once, sitting upright and fixing Matt with a stern look. "Very well. Matt, would you care to explain to us what this is all about?"

Matt's breath hissed out through his teeth, and he glanced slowly toward Keith, who shrugged.

"Okay," Matt said. "So I guess we need to go back to when Zarkon attacked the summit."

"You know about that?" Shiro asked.

"We found each other in the Heart of the Red Lion," Keith said. "During the attack, Red had... I guess you would call it a flashback, or something like it. I went out to see her afterwards, and she took me to the Heart. Matt was there, too, so I filled him in on what happened."

Shiro nodded. "Right. You mentioned something about that."

Matt attempted a smile, but gave up quickly and picked at the hem of his pants. He'd changed out of his armor while Coran got the mind-meld set up, as had the others who weren’t already in more comfortably attire. "Anyway, Keith got caught up in Red's flashback and saw some of her memories. Or... Voltron's collective memories, anyway. We're not sure how much of it Red saw first-hand. But one of the memories was about Lealle. And... and Zarkon."

Allura gave no outward reaction to Matt's words other than a slight tightening of her grip on her ankles. "And?"

"We're not sure," Keith said. "Red didn't want to talk about it, and I feel like we have to be missing something, but... It seemed like Lealle teamed up with Zarkon. Against Alfor."

A pang shot through Coran, and he had to close his eyes for a moment as the training deck around him seemed to tilt on its axis. He heard Allura suck in a breath and sensed the glare she leveled at Keith. "My mother would _never_ \--"

"I know." Matt held up his hands, his face pained. "That's why we didn't want to say anything. Red didn't want to talk about it, but she told us that she trusted Lealle to the very end. I figured that meant it really was all just a big misunderstanding. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, though, so when I got to the temple and had a chance to ask my Question, that was the only thing on my mind."

"You asked about Lealle, then?" Val asked, her own chin resting on her knees.

Matt nodded. "I asked why she would choose Zarkon over Alfor—if that was what happened in the first place."

A heavy silence settled over the group, none of them wanting to ask the question they were all thinking. Coran gathered himself to do it, but Allura found her voice first.

"What did the sage say?"

Her voice was impossibly small, wavering on the line between hope and dread. Coran had already claimed the seat beside her, and he reached out now to press a hand to her back. He waited, gauging her reaction, and when she didn't pull away he began to rub soothing circles between her shoulder blades until she leaned into his touch.

Matt breathed in, then released the air slowly. "She didn't say much of anything. Just that the only way I would understand is if I saw it for myself." He lifted his head, meeting Allura's eyes. "She was right. Which is why I'm not going to try to explain it to you. It might be more painful this way, I know, but I... I'm still not sure what to think about it, and I don't want to give you a warped idea of what really happened."

"Thus the mind-meld." Allura nodded, sitting up straighter--and pressing closer to Coran at the same time. "All right. Waiting isn't going to make this any easier."

"Right." Matt closed his eyes, and Coran's vision began to fade, the training deck dissolving into mist and then the others disappearing one by one until Coran was alone in a swirl of colored lights.

* * *

The temple was a magnificent sight--like touring some of the most famous and most ancient ruins back on Altea, except that this place was in pristine shape, not a block out of place. The carvings in the pillars might have been done yesterday, and Lealle hardly dared set foot on the white marble steps for fear she would mar the polished shine.

Sa let out a wordless trill and raced up the steps. "Is that _Klennav_?"

Lealle followed his gaze to a series of engravings around the eaves of the portico. Lealle had seen enough Altean ruins in her day to recognize the ancient language, a remnant of one of the cultures that had united under the Hythan Accords. Only a handful of scholars could read the language, but Lealle honestly wouldn't be surprised if Sa had made a study of it one month when he was bored.

"So... this is it?" Rukka asked, rubbing the shell of her ear. "We just go in there and ask our Questions?"

"Yes." Katrona's voice was clipped, her patience apparently run out by the encounter with Allura's group earlier. "You may all go as one unit and hear each others Questions and answers, or you may go in individually. It makes no difference to me."

"Is there any particular reason why we _wouldn't_ want to go all together?" Rukka asked.

Zarkon opened his mouth, then hesitated, his gaze sliding away. "Actually... If it's all right with the rest of you, I would like to ask my Question in private."

"What, shy?" Lealle teased. Her grin fell away when Zarkon squirmed away from her attention. He actually looked uncomfortable, and Lealle backpedaled at once. "No, hey, you're right. You've got a personal Question to ask, that's totally fair. We'll see you back here when you're done."

He managed a weak smile for her, then climbed the stairs. As he was passing a thick marble column, however, Sa dropped down and launched into a stream of chatter that left Zarkon little room to break in. Zarkon hesitated, and Lealle wondered if she should go drag Sa off him. Before she made up her mind, Zarkon shook his head, the rigid set of his shoulders easing, and the two of them headed off with a temple assistant to ask their Questions.

"What about the rest of you?" Alfor asked. "Anyone else want to run off alone, or should we all go together?"

Keturah shrugged, Rukka hummed vaguely, and Lealle clapped her hands. "Well if no one has a preference, let's all go together." She charged up the stairs and flagged down another assistant, who led the group to a small, bare viewing room, where the sage Tryvium soon joined them.

"Welcome, paladins, Your Majesty." Tryvium nodded to Alfor, then tucked his hands into his sleeves and regarded them all with mild curiosity. "I’m sure you're all eager to get to it, so shall we begin? Who would like to ask their Question first?"

Lealle waved her hand, bouncing on her toes as a surge of energy caught her by surprise. She'd been looking forward to this trip for ages now, even before she found out about the Questions. In all honesty, she didn't put much stock in this part of the experience, but she appreciated the tradition of it, and as long as everyone else was agonizing over their questions, she might as well get them all started. Right?

"I'm not looking for knowledge, honestly," she said. "Just a little advice." Tryvium gestured for her to continue, but suddenly she found herself faltering, tripping over her own words as she tried to work out how to phrase her Question. "What's my role on this team? Not--I'm not asking because I feel out of place. I think I'm pretty comfortable in the role of paladin by now. I just mean... Blue and I have a good thing going. I've seen improvement in my piloting and my combat skills. But being a paladin is about more than that. So--where do I fit in this team? How do I support them?"

Tryvium's smile was warmer than she expected, like a grandfather doting on a favorite grandchild. "A worthy question. And perhaps one with more weight than you realize. You know that each lion brings something different to the team? And that, by extension, their paladins do the same?"

Lealle nodded. "Like how Black's the head and Red has the whole impulse-control thing going on." (Somewhere behind her, Keturah made an indignant sound, but Lealle ignored her.) "So?"

"So, what do you know of the Blue Lion? Why did she choose you?"

"I mean... We just clicked, I guess? I don't know. Blue paladins don't really have a thing like the others. We just roll with the punches."

A glimmer of amusement entered the sage's eye. "Ah. And is that not a quality in itself? Flexibility. A gift for adapting to any circumstances, any team. The other four are like pillars, firm in their ideals and their aspirations. You, on the other hand, flow between them like the tide, filling up the spaces they create."

"I'm not sure I follow..."

"The Blue Lion maintains the bonds within Voltron. Not just the bond she has with the blue paladin; _all_ of them. She is the only lion who has the ability to choose her paladins unilaterally; all her sisters defer to her judgment."

Alfor let out a startled laugh. "Truly? I didn't know that."

Tryvium nodded. "The other lions find those they think would make a good paladin, but the Blue Lion is more skilled than the rest at seeing the team as a whole. They bring their choices before her, and she approves or rejects them at her discretion." Tryvium paused, his gaze more intense than before. "No one can be a paladin of Voltron unless the Blue Lion chooses them, and yet she is quite picky with who she allows to pilot her.

"Her paladins, you see, are charged with supporting and unifying the team. The black paladins are leaders, tasked with upholding teamwork and making decisions and arbitrating conflicts that arise when priorities clash. Greens are problem-solvers, who identify sticking points and suggest solutions, and who ensure the team has adequate resources to face the challenges that come up. Reds are the motivation and the moral drive of the team, guiding them toward goals and spurring them to action. Yellows, like Blues, are support, but Yellows are charged with they physical well-being of their team--with healing, defense, and those small comforts it's all too easy to forget in the midst of such grand fates as Voltron stirs. And Blues preside over the emotional concerns of the team, both as individuals and as a team that requires healthy relationships to function at their best."

"Oh." Lealle blinked. She wasn't sure what answer she'd been expecting from the sage, but certainly nothing as grand as this. "So... what? Should I start conspiring with Coran to run more team-building exercises?"

Keturah groaned, and Rukka laughed nervously, but Lealle's humor was dampened by Tryvium's expression. He looked immensely sad for just a moment as he looked at her, and she stared back at him, holding her breath as she waited for him to continue.

At last he moved, closing the distance between them and taking hold of her shoulders. "If I could give you one piece of advice," he said softly, "it would be this: Trust your heart. You cannot control what decisions other people make, and there are those who would take advantage of your loyalty, but that does not mean you must debase yourself by becoming like them. Stand tall, Lealle, Paladin of the Blue Lion, Queen of Altea, and you will inspire others to greatness."

* * *

"It's just a diplomatic meeting, Coran," Alfor said with a laugh, clapping Coran on the back as he fretted over the clasp on Alfor’s cloak. "I'll be gone a couple of days, bored out of my mind with all the chatter, and then I'll come right back."

"But are you _sure_ you don't want to take the paladins? Not even Zarkon? You said he needed more experience with this sort of thing."

Alfor sighed, suppressing his impatience to be away. The situation on Cybile would certainly teach Zarkon a thing or two about negotiations, but Alfor feared it was too volatile to bring in untested elements--and, true, Zarkon had come into his own as a black paladin in the last three decades, but he still had an impulsive streak and a tendency to grow sharp when people didn't go along with his plans.

"Next time," Alfor promised. "For now, his time is better spent training with his team."

"Don't you think that's a decision he ought to make for himself?" Coran asked with an arch of his brow. "He's not a child any longer."

Alfor grinned. "Funny you should say that, Coran. You're the one who keeps teasing him for barely being half a century."

Coran's expression darkened, and Alfor eased off on the teasing. Coran wasn't the type to get bothered over nothing, and Alfor had learned it was better to listen to him when he urged caution.

Never mind that this time it was completely unfounded.

"Honestly," Alfor said. "This trip isn't half as much as I'm making it sound. I wouldn't be going at all except that Captain Jikalla has family in the region. She asked me to put in an appearance--keep things from boiling over, you know. That's all this is. Jikalla's squad will act as my guard for the duration, and I'm going to be calling you in eight vargas to complain about how boring it all is."

That drew a chuckle from Coran, and he waggled a finger at Alfor. "Oh, no. This is your own choice. You want to whine about it, you'd best find someone else."

Alfor laughed, not least of all because he knew Coran would indulge him in any amount of whining Alfor felt was necessary, however much Coran protested. "Of course. Make sure you keep the paladins on their toes while I'm away. Wouldn't want them getting complacent."

The gleam in Coran's eye said the team was in for a hell of a movement, and Alfor didn't doubt that he'd have more than a few complaints waiting for him when he returned. He wondered for a moment whether he ought to remind Coran not to get anyone killed but--well, if the legendary paladins of Voltron couldn't stand up to Coran's schemes, they didn't deserve to call themselves the Defenders of the Universe.

Alfor raised a hand in farewell, then headed for the secondary Guard hangar, where he was to meet Jikalla and her team. He stopped only once on the way to give Allura a kiss goodbye and to officially hand off command to her. She'd grown into a fine young woman, and she thrived under the burden of leadership in a way Alfor never had at her age. Between Allura and Coran, he had no doubt that the Castle of Lions could weather any storms that might arrive in his absence.

Jikalla saluted when Alfor entered the hangar, then barked commands at her squad to prepare for departure. They were taking a pod only large enough for the seven of them. Alfor was sure Zarkon would critique the ship's minimal defenses. The man never had quite moved on from the mindset he'd learned as a member of Alfor's honor guard. It was endearing, in a way, but it was also damn frustrating.

They arrived on the orbital station above Cybile quietly, declining to register their presence with the automated systems that might alert the politicians, economists, and other interested parties present at this conference. More to the point, Alfor declined to register his presence with the security grid that reported back to the disproportionate deployment of government troops and private mercenaries who happened to be loitering nearby. Going through all that red tape would take far too long, and it would ruin the surprise, to boot.

Nothing in the universe amused Alfor quite as much as the looks of mingled awe and horror that greeted a surprise arrival from the King of Altea. Like a pack of children caught painting on the walls, their squabbling over who had rights to the resources on the moon below tapered off bit by bit and then in a rush. A few assistants and scribes near the door caught sight of him first, their faces draining of color, and the whispers chased him into the heart of the room, until he was left staring down at a table of rich, entitled entrepreneurs left red-faced in the midst of their own mess.

The thing was, Alfor knew how to command a room. He'd learned that skill early, and he'd learned it well. On Altea, the weight of his lineage was enough to do the job for him, but even then he'd been destined for diplomacy, as the Senate took care of the actual governing of Altea, and his mother had hired the very best tutors to prepare him. The drama of it, the _show_ , had always captivated him.

Now he carried a different authority. Not just the Altean crown, but the lions of Voltron itself. It wasn't a game, and it wasn't for entertainment. Authority was a weapon, perhaps one of the most powerful in his arsenal, and everyone in this chamber felt the weight of it as they entered his sights.

"King Alfor," one of the figures at the central table stammered, half rising from his seat. "I mean--Your Majesty." He sketched a hasty bow and nearly lost his hat. From the clothes he wore--plain and practical, unlike the showier fashions in evidence around him--he would be the ambassador from Ruta, one of the two planets vying for control of Cybile. Across the table from him was the delegation from Ruta's sister planet, Voch. This group was made up exclusively of businessmen, with a bit of hired muscle to lend a little extra weight where their money fell short.

One of the Voches entrepreneurs rose more gracefully, extending a hand toward Alfor as though they stood on equal footing in this meeting. "Your Highness. A pleasure to welcome you to Cybile. I had not heard of your visit, or I would have arranged a greeting more fit to one of your station."

Alfor glanced at the man's hand for only a second before raising his chin and claiming the seat the man had vacated. "The proper address is Your Majesty," he said with a private smirk, "but I thank you anyway. I hear there's been a bit of a clamor over the right of conquest in this region. Allow me to offer my services as a mediator."

It wasn't the sort of offer one refused, and clearly everyone in the room knew it. They'd all seen Alfor's face before. They knew who he was.

It was drudgery, sorting out the mess of bureaucracy and corporate scheming that had lead to this point, but the picture Captain Jikalla had laid out for him was that of a conflict about to boil over into outright violence. Alfor had only been here for twenty dobashes and he could already see why she'd asked him for help.

No matter. Alfor had dealt with far worse tangles before. A few quintants and he'd have this all sorted out—and hopefully have everyone laughing by then, too. He did hate when things got tense.

* * *

Zarkon's heart lodged in his throat as scenes of unrest and rising tension played out on the screen before him. The situation on Daibazaal had deteriorated in the last phoebs to the point that it had attracted the interest of the entire Alliance. The news holocast had brought on an Olkari analyst to dissect the socioeconomic factors that had led to the riots and looting, but Zarkon just felt sick.

These were his people.

True, he hadn't set foot on Dabazaal in ages--hadn't lingered in the area for any length of time since he left fifty decaphoebs ago--but time couldn't erase the strings that tied him to his home. To the Galra. He'd missed the early signs of impending crisis, but since the riots had first made intergalactic news some phoebs ago, he'd delved into the records, reaching out to what friends he still had back home.

When he left to join the Voltron Guard, he'd never imagined the Vkullor attack would have such far-reaching effects.

"I understand you're concerned," Alfor said when Zarkon broached the subject with him that evening after another long conference with the other member systems of the Altean Alliance. "I am too, and we're already doing what we can for the Galra people. Our scientists are looking into Quintessence generators to replace the world crystal, and Altea is sending humanitarian aid to the cities that are most directly affected."

"Is that all?" Zarkon asked. "People are _dying_ , Alfor. We need to do something."

"Something like what?" Alfor's tone was mild--not reproach, nor disdain, just curiosity. "Voltron was not built to fight these kinds of fights."

Zarkon clenched his teeth. "I wasn't planning on shooting the problem until it went away," he snapped. "But surely we could at least go to Daibazaal. Help with the evacuations, give the people there a little bit of hope."

"There are other people who need you, Zarkon," Alfor said, his brow furrowed. "I... This is your decision. As the black paladin, you have the right to lead your team where you will, and I won't interfere with that. But I urge you to remember where your strengths lie and ask yourself if this is truly the best course."

He lingered a moment longer, hand on Zarkon's shoulder in an almost paternal gesture--paternal, despite the fact that they were the same age now, relative to their own people. Zarkon bristled at the treatment, but held his tongue as Alfor smiled, then turned toward an aide who had just entered the conference room with a holopad. As Alfor walked away, Zarkon turned and stalked out, fuming.

Did Alfor think he hadn't considered the implications of his decision? Zarkon had dedicated his life to Voltron and to saving people who needed him. He was well aware of just how many problems were waiting around every corner. Keturah often criticized him for what she saw as arrogance, but Zarkon had never understood people who were content to save just a few people, to win just a few battles, while surrendering on every other front because it seemed too difficult to be worth the bother.

Zarkon continued to fume as he stalked back towards the paladins' quarters at the castle's core. At this time of day, most of the others would be busy training or reviewing calls for aid and other intel that the Guard had passed along. With luck, Zarkon could find a bit of peace in the lounge while he calmed himself.

The lounge was not empty when he arrived, and just in case Alfor's dismissal hadn't been enough of a slap in the face, a holoscreen was up, showing the same images he'd spent the morning agonizing over.

Rukka jumped as Zarkon joined her on the sofa, her ears folding back. "I take it you heard."

Zarkon glared at the screen, a helpless rage curling in his chest as the riots spread across the capital. Rukka, blessedly, had muted the audio, but Zarkon didn't need reductivist analysts trying to find the singular cause for the unrest. "I heard," he growled.

"Oh, boy."

Zarkon turned to give her a sharp glance, but it was difficult to stay angry at Rukka. She'd been a paladin longer than Zarkon by over a decade, already a professional by the time he arrived on the Castle of Lions. He'd spent a great deal of time with her--with the Galra Paladin, an icon for their entire people and a planetary pride.

She was old now. Old for a Galra and even older for a paladin. Galra were not a particularly long-lived race, by the standards of the Alliance, but Rukka had nevertheless held her station as yellow paladin longer than all but a handful of paladins. Longer, even, than some Alteans. Zarkon kept thinking she must be ready to step down, but she remained, even as their work took a toll on her joints.

Some days, Zarkon thought she stayed just to look out for him.

"What?" he asked, shying away from her knowing smirk. "What's that look for?"

"Nothing, nothing," Rukka said. "Just that I know that look. Have you already talked to Alfor, or are you trying to work yourself up to it?"

Zarkon pressed his lips together, hating that she knew him so well.

Rukka laughed, wrapping a hand around the back of his neck and giving it a companionable squeeze. "Let me guess. He thinks this is the sort of thing we ought to let the Guard handle."

"He didn't say it in so many words," Zarkon said. "But yes."

Drawing in a long, slow breath, Rukka nodded. "I'm not surprised. Most other times, that's exactly what we would do. The Guard's far better equipped to provide aid over large areas. Or to enforce order, as the case may be."

A growl built in Zarkon's throat as he watched some of Daibazaal's guard force attempt to do just that, with nonlethal weapons and deterrents. "Suppressing the riots is only plastering over the real issue," he said.

"I know." Rukka's words cut through his budding rant, and he looked at her, surprised to find a sheen of tears in her eyes. "Things are bad, Zarkon. I don't know that the Guard's equipped to help our people... but I'm not sure we are, either."

"So, what? We just sit by and watch as millions die?"

"I don't know." She tilted her head to the side to meet his gaze. "I know that's not the answer you want to hear, Zarkon, but it's the truth. I don't know what to do. I don't know what we _can_ do. But if you think of something, you let me know. I'll be right there with you all the way."

* * *

Lealle was with the others when the news broke. The Galra--always a peaceful people, even in their unquenchable ambition--had launched an attack on a defenseless planet. Lealle's heart stopped beating, her mind numb like it had decided not to process anything until the immediate danger was past.

Even so, she saw the moment each of the others processed the news: Rukka with heartbreak and sorrow, Sa with quivering indignation. Keturah had already begun to analyze the situation, searching for some telling detail that might turn the situation to their favor. And Zarkon looked only frustrated, though the way his hands clenched at his sides said he was trying very hard not to show his thoughts on his face.

They left immediately. Of course they did. Lealle pressed Alfor for more details on the way, and he sketched out the situation for the team. The Hovent sector was a quiet stretch of space with few habitable planets and even fewer civilizations of note. The planet the Galra had attacked was home to a primitive people--advanced enough to be considered sapient under Alliance law and therefore protected from outside interference, but far too early in their development to stand up to an invasion.

"In the interest of fairness," Alfor said as the planet came into view, blue and green with a single moon and two Galra cruisers stationed in orbit, "I should mention that the Galra did not progress directly to aggression. It seems they wanted to colonize the planet, but when the Alliance issued a resolution of censure, they dug in their heels and began to amass a fleet. The Alliance fears that sending in our own armies, or even the Voltron Guard, would only cause tensions to boil over."

"You hope that if Voltron puts in an appearance, they'll fold," Sa said.

Alfor offered a smile. "We might as well be optimistic. But be ready for anything. Local command has shown no signs of bending so far."

Zarkon nodded, and his voice was clipped when he called for them to form Voltron. Tension reverberated in the bond, mingling with anger, unease, and a deep-seated sorrow from both Zarkon and Rukka. These were their people attacking an innocent world. They both wanted to believe the best--to believe, at least, that this fleet was acting without the blessing of the government it served.

But all the paladins knew what they needed to do. They stopped short of the Galra cruisers as Alfor opened a comms channel to order the Galra to pull out.

The Galra gave no answer other than to open fire on Voltron.

* * *

The battle was over quickly. Few fleets could stand against Voltron in open combat, and this was not one of them. Within dobashes, it was clear how the battle would end. But the Galra refused to surrender or retreat. They stood their ground, and after the first cruiser fell, the second turned its weapons on the planet below.

Fear and horror propelled Voltron toward the cruiser, sword drawn back for a strike. Lealle would spend the next phoeb replaying that moment in her mind, wondering if they could have done something different. They'd avoided lasers out of fear of collateral damage, but a laser might have reached the cruiser in time. If it got through the particle barrier. If it struck in just the right place to take out the power source for the weapon trained on the planet. Or maybe they could have lured the cruisers away from the planet. Fought them somewhere they wouldn't have had a clear shot.

In the end, it didn't matter. The cruiser fired a single shot from a turret that had so far been quiet. It wasn't a laser, or a photon canon, or any other weapon the paladins had seen before, and it left no visible scars on the landscape below. But when the paladins landed after the battle to apprise the damage, Lealle's stomach turned over.

Something had happened to this planet's crystal. It would take several quintants more for Altea's scholars to determine that the crystal was dead, Quintessence slowly leaching from the planet.

By then, Zarkon had already moved beyond grief to outright rage. He cornered Alfor on the bridge and informed him that he would be going to Daibazaal, "To ensure that nothing like this ever happens again."

Alfor didn't try to stop him.

* * *

Cybile was fracturing.

Nearly fifteen decaphoebs had passed since the treaty that had split the moon in two, giving both rival worlds equal access to the rich deposits of ore and Quintessence that made the moon so valuable in the first place. There had been discontent from the start, of course. Both sides felt cheated out of land and resources that should have been theirs.

Some people still held a grudge against the Altean Alliance for intervening in the first place. It was almost as though they'd wanted a war.

But it was not the first time Alfor had caused a stir, and it wouldn't be the last. If people hated him for pursuing peace, so be it. So long as it kept wars from breaking out, he would shoulder all the criticism the universe had to offer. Peace was worth the cost.

It would have been worth it on Cybile, too, if the rival planets hadn't gutted that moon like they were afraid other companies were going to steal the resources right out from under their feet. At ten decaphoebs, more than half the ore was gone. At twelve, companies began to pull out as the cost of extracting the remaining resources began to outstrip the value of what was being collected. At thirteen, Cybicore Industries accused CyTech of poaching Quintessence from Cybicore reserves.

Now the sector was once more on the brink of violence as governments stepped in with sanctions and ever-increasing security forces.

A headache built behind Alfor's eyes as he drafted a memo to both sides. He wasn't ready to escalate to open threats--bringing Voltron into problems too soon tended to have an incendiary effect--but with a little luck, the reminder that other powers were watching would set the rival factions on a path to arbitration.

The door to Alfor's private study opened just as he was wrapping up, and he glanced over his shoulder to see that it was Lealle, dressed in a nightgown with a silk robe tied over top.

"What are you working on so late?" she asked, tugging at the neck of her robe and crossing to his desk.

Alfor hit send before she had a chance to read the memo, then gave his wife a wry smile. "Politics," he said. "Drag me away from this hell. I'm begging you."

She laughed, draping herself over his shoulder, and he turned to kiss the side of her head. The situation at Cybile still simmered in the back of his mind, nagging at him to stay long enough to see if either party would respond to his message, though he knew it would be vargas before that happened.

So he let Lealle drag him off to bed and banished his worries until tomorrow.

* * *

"Our planet is dead," Gorak said. "And our people are dying with it."

Zarkon struggled to keep his face blank. This was not news to him. It wasn't news to anyone. Daibazaal had died with the Vkullor that attacked it so long ago. Altea, Olkarion, Bairel, and half a dozen others were working day and night to produce Quintessence generators and synthetic nutrients to sustain the population while the Alliance made plans to relocate the Galra people. One could hardly live under the banner of the Alliance without hearing about the tragedy at Daibazaal.

"I know," Zarkon said. He'd come dressed in his paladin armor, a representative of the Alliance and of Voltron. He'd thought it would bring hope to his people, to know that he cared, that he was working to make things better for them, but everywhere he looked, he saw only hatred and distrust in the eyes of the people on the street. "And I can only assume you meant to take that planet in Hovent as the new Galra homeworld, but what I don't understand is why. Surely you could have found an uninhabited planet that suited your needs."

Gorak laughed, the sound sharp and bitter. A few of the others in the room laughed with him, while others quietly averted their eyes. Nearly half the seats reserved for Princes were empty today, and those who had showed up all had an unsavory look to them. Zarkon had heard rumors about a coup. Militant groups had been protesting the government's inaction for decaphoebs, clamoring for changes to the old regime. Zarkon had given those rumors no credence, but now that he was here he wasn't so sure. The rulers had changed. Whether it was a shift in the popular opinion that had put them in power or a show of force made little difference.

These _were_ the rulers of Daibazaal. They controlled the fleets that patrolled the skies and the spaceports. They received and distributed the aid sent by the Alliance. And by their own admission, they were the ones who had authorized the attack on the unnamed planet in the Hovent Sector.

"You really do live in your own little world, don't you?" Gorak asked. "Out there on your own little floating utopia, with hundreds of people fawning over you day and night. You really think you're making a difference in the universe."

Zarkon bristled, crossing his arms to try to contain his temper. People were dying, he reminded himself. Tensions were high and people were bound to get a little short, especially when Zarkon had come without any tangible aid to give these people.

"What are you trying to say, Gorak?"

"We tried to do this the right way." Gorak turned and stalked back to the table where he'd been seated when Zarkon arrived. He opened a drawer, pulled out a handheld, and fiddled with it as he returned to the center of the room. "We've known we needed to relocate for twenty decaphoebs. We suspected it for a long time before that, even, but it was twenty-two decaphoebs ago that we first put in a request for emergency resettlement. We filled out all the forms, jumped through all the hoops. Found a little habitable planet with no sapient life to object to our arrival."

Zarkon's mouth ran dry. "But... if that's true, then why--?"

"We were denied." Gorak handed over the device, on which he'd called up a series of files: the forms Daibazaal had submitted, the official decision to grant the planet Philitrakka to another petitioner. "King Alfor buried our petition and pushed through the other claim."

Zarkon's heart sank. "What? That doesn’t sound like him." He closed out of the files Gorak had selected and sorted through the rest. Daibazaal, it seemed, had put in claims for half a dozen other uninhabited worlds since Philitrakka. Each had been rejected, two because of the expense of terraforming the planet to fit Galra environmental needs, one because it was home to several protected species.

The other three worlds each had other petitions filed by other parties--planets and peoples Zarkon knew. The Krovites were a refugee group fleeing a genocide on their homeworld, a planet that had declined to join the Altean Alliance. Luinal and its satellites were dealing with rampant overpopulation that had been deemed a humanitarian crisis. The Ibellan homeworld had been hit by a pandemic that claimed millions of lives before the Alliance stepped in. The mass evacuation, quarantine, and treatment of survivors had been a last, desperate measure to save the Ibellan culture. It had taken the combined efforts of over fifty worlds, and when all was said and done, the half a billion Ibellans who had been rescued were left with nowhere to go.

Zarkon had helped with each of these crises.

He'd heard Alfor promise the people, in each case, that he would find somewhere new for them to live.

"I didn't know you'd also requested resettlement rights," Zarkon said, his voice soft. "No one ever said anything."

Gorak snorted. "Would it have made any difference?"

"Yes." Zarkon raised his head, glaring at Gorak. "Even if these other cases were emergencies, the Alliance should have acknowledged Daibazaal's plight. Helped you to find a planet of your own."

"Habitable planets don't grow on trees, Paladin Zarkon," Gorak said. "And we don't have Voltron on our side."

Zarkon's blood ran cold. "Voltron doesn't take sides. We are protectors of all people."

A sharp-edged smile tugged at Gorak's lips without reaching his eyes. "Funny how you still believe that. But the thing is? That weapon of yours is more than any planet, any collection of planets, even, can stand up to. You may not think of it as taking sides, but that's only because there _are_ no sides when Voltron is in play. As soon as you or your king make their opinion known, it might as well be law. No one's going to stand up to Voltron. No one can."

* * *

"And you never thought to mention it to me? To any of us?"

"I've already apologized, Zarkon. What more do you want from me? I was dealing with crises, and I was preoccupied with the people who were dying right in front of me--as were you, if I recall correctly. Maybe I was informed of the situation on Daibazaal; I couldn't honestly tell you. I forgot my own daughter's birthday when we were helping the Ibellans!"

Lealle stopped in the doorway of Alfor's private comms bay, out of the line of sight of the screen he had pulled up. Zarkon and Alfor were both willful, opinionated men, and clashes between them were not unheard of--even heated ones. But Lealle had never hard Zarkon's voice so cold, or Alfor's so baldly dismissive.

Zarkon growled, and even distorted by the angle of the screen, his face was twisted with rage. "I don't believe you."

"Believe me or don't, Zarkon," Alfor said, drawing himself up. "That's not my problem. Have you settled the situation on Daibazaal or not?"

For a long moment, Zarkon was silent, and a horrible knot settled in the pit of Lealle's stomach.

"No," Zarkon finally said. "I suspect it will take far longer than I originally estimated. I'll call you when I have more to report." He cut the connection without waiting for Alfor to reply, and Lealle pulled her coat closed, pinning it with her crossed arms as she went to Alfor's side.

"Is everything all right?" she asked.

Alfor tensed, then shot her a look. "Fine."

Lealle stared at him, one eyebrow inching toward her hairline. "Fine," she said flatly. "That didn't sound fine to me, Alfor. What happened? You said something about the Ibellans?"

Alfor bowed his head, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Apparently Daibazaal sent Voltron a request for aid during the outbreak. It must have slipped through the cracks somewhere in all the chaos, and now they're blaming our lack of response for that mess in Hovent."

"What?" Lealle jerked back, staring at the empty space where Zarkon's feed had just been. "They can't be serious."

Alfor waved his hand helplessly. "Zarkon's upset about it. About what happened then or about the political climate on Daibazaal now; I'm not sure which. Maybe both."

"You want me to talk to him?" Lealle cocked her head to the side. "Maybe after he's had a chance to calm down?"

The rigid set of Alfor's shoulders eased, and he turned toward her, pulling her down into his lap. "It's all right. I'll give him a call tomorrow and ask if there's anything we can do to fix this."

Lealle smiled and leaned down to kiss him. “If you say so," she said. "Now come on. Allura wanted to talk to you about paladin training.”

* * *

Late that night, unable to sleep, Lealle stole out of her quarters and down to the comms bay. She didn't need the sages of Oriande to tell her that the emotional well-being of her team was her responsibility. She'd never been able to walk away when her friends got into a fight, and she always hated to see any of them upset.

Maybe she should have listened to Alfor and let them sort it out tomorrow, but... Well, her husband excelled at a great many things, but addressing fears and frustrations was not one of them. He was a man of action, as was Zarkon. They might well set aside their differences tomorrow for the sake of the universe--but setting it aside and addressing the root of the issue were two completely different things.

It was still early in Daibazaal's capital, but Zarkon didn't answer Lealle's call. After a moment's deliberation, she left a message letting Zarkon know she'd heard about the troubles with planetary leaders and wanted to talk about it, if he got the chance.

Zarkon never returned her call.

* * *

There was a festival on Ruta--not anything to do with the mounting hostilities in the skies over Cybile, just a quiet local celebration of some minor significance. If anyone thought it odd that the paladins of Voltron would put in an appearance, they said nothing. And the paladins, for their part, seemed not to notice the underlying tension.

Alfor considered telling them what was happening, but it was still the machinations of minor factions and isolated corporations. This didn't have to turn into a major conflict. It was enough to have the paladins here, their lions presiding over the festival, and to lock eyes with the head of CyTech in the crowd.

He paled in the face of Alfor's stare, and Alfor offered a thin smile.

He prayed the situation never escalated beyond simple posturing.

* * *

It had been a phoeb.

Bone-deep weariness clung to Zarkon, and he knew what he needed was to take a step back, to catch up on all the sleep he'd missed in between meetings with Daibazaal's princes and volunteering with the construction crews. There were plans to build dome cities on the edges of the spreading wastelands in the hopes that Altean Quintessence generators might be able to preserve small pockets of population. The Black Lion was invaluable in positioning large sections of machinery and in ferrying workers and supplies from one dome to another.

The end result, of course, was that Zarkon only got a few vargas of sleep each night--less than that, considering he lay awake in bed most nights trying to find a more permanent solution to his problem. He'd talked to Sa once, early on in his stay on Daibazaal, and to Keturah more recently, but most of his conversations were with Alfor, and each ended in another argument as Alfor refused to admit to any wrongdoing.

Lealle had called three times, and Zarkon had declined her call each time. He didn't know if she was aware of her husband’s actions or not, but either way he didn't have the heart to fight with her--about the fact of Alfor's betrayal or about whatever justifications she wanted to make. He'd heard all that already from Alfor, and he respected Lealle far too much to let things get ugly.

Or maybe he just didn't want to find out that she'd taken Alfor's side. Voltron was a tight-knit team, more like family than friends, but Lealle had always stood by her husband. Zarkon didn't see why it should be any different in this.

He returned to the capital late, having spent most of the day getting people settled in the latest dome city. The populace was skeptical of them, to say the least. As the wastelands spread and more of the planet became uninhabitable, the population had drained into the capital, where Quintessence was most plentiful, or else had already left the planet in search of new homes. The dome cities were an experimental solution--and a temporary one, at that--and few people trusted them to stand as the land lost its Quintessence. There had nearly been a stampede at Dome 5 today as people tried to emigrate en masse to the capital.

Zarkon had calmed the panic, but it had been a long and draining day, and he was looking forward to however much sleep the universe afforded him.

When he arrived back at his apartments in Cel Daibazaal, however, it was to a flashing light on the comms panel indicating an urgent message. Groaning, Zarkon began the playback and went to get a glass of water.

"Zarkon." Gorak's voice, tired and strained. Zarkon had rarely heard the man so close to pleading. "The Trenchaar deal fell through. Alfor's meddling again. I guess he told the Aarak that they couldn't trust us. Insinuated that we'd attack them the way we attacked that world out in Hovent."

Zarkon's heart fell as Gorak heaved a sigh. He'd had hope for Trenchaar. They both had. The Aarak were a tenuous ally to the Galra, but they _were_ an ally. Trenchaar was part of their system, and therefore under their jurisdiction, but the princes had negotiated a deal, under which a small portion of Daibazaal's population could establish a colony on Trenchaar in exchange for taxation rights.

"I don't know what else to do, Zarkon," Gorak went on. "This news is going to hit the streets in the morning, and if we don't have a new plan ready, there's going to be more riots. We _can't_ keep going like this."

Zarkon heard what Gorak didn't want to say directly: if they couldn't petition or negotiate their way to new land for the Galra people, that left only one option. Conquest. Zarkon had argued against it from the start, and the princes had listened to him, if only because they knew that any conflict with the Alliance would end with thousands of Galra dead.

And now it was starting to look like there were no other options left.

Zarkon mourned the loss of sleep, but he couldn't have slept through a crisis like this even if his conscience didn't make itself known. So he pulled on his paladin armor and headed out--but he didn't go straight to the heart of Cel Daibazaal to meet with the princes. He took his speeder instead to the cliffs outside town, overlooking the lights of the capital. He climbed up to the plateau where he'd left the Black Lion and, steeling himself for a fight, he contacted Alfor.

"Trenchaar," Zarkon said without preamble when Alfor picked up. He was fuming, his thoughts tumbling one over another in and endless storm of indignation and rage. Alfor had _no_ right to get involved in these matters.

Alfor's gaze was old and sad, but no surprise showed on his face. He'd known this was coming, then. "The Aarak deserved to know what they were getting into," Alfor said. "Not only what the princes were willing to divulge."

Zarkon felt the Black Lion rumble beneath him, her fury rising to match his own. "That's not what this is about and you know it, Alfor. You've moved against the Galra too many times to pretend you haven't made a pattern of it. It started with Philitrakka and it hasn't stopped since. Are you trying to kill them?"

"I'm trying to maintain peace in the universe, Zarkon. That's what we do. I'm sorry that conditions on Daibazaal have deteriorated further than I had realized, but that does not excuse their attack on another sapient race--especially not one that was utterly unaware of the universe beyond their own sky."

"You can't pin all the blame for that disaster on the princes, Alfor. You pushed them to it. You took away every other avenue they had. You forced a fight in Hovent. We weren't going to attack anyone--we could have coexisted with those people peacefully. Improved their lives, even!"

Alfor let out a laugh. "We? So you're siding with them now, are you?"

"After what you did on Trenchaar? Yes."

Alfor's expression darkened, and Black extended a warning to Zarkon. They were nearing a line here that, once crossed, could not be undone. Zarkon shook her off.

"The Aarak made their own choice," Alfor said. "I only provided council."

"You lied to them. You lied to _me_ , Alfor." All the promises of aid, all the assurances that he wanted what was best for the Galra people, and then he went behind Zarkon's back to sabotage their last chance at peace? Not to mention the economic sanctions leveled against Daibazaal by the Domenata Cluster and their extensive trading network. The Galra were already drowning, their wealth rapidly running out as they tried desperately to keep the citizens of Daibazaal alive in an increasingly hostile environment. With these new sanctions, they were ruined.

And Alfor didn't even care.

Closing his eyes, Alfor drew in a breath and released it slowly. "I didn't lie. I simply didn’t see the need to brief you on every matter to cross my desk, especially as it had nothing to do with Voltron."

Zarkon's hands closed around the armrests and he squeezed, fighting to listen to Black's silent urging to breathe, to think through his anger. He needed to remain in control of the situation. "They are my people, Alfor. Whether or not it was relevant to Voltron, it was relevant to _me_." And Alfor knew that.

"You are a paladin now," Alfor said, his tone insufferably condescending. "The black paladin. Your duty is to something much larger than the planet on which you were born. You must learn to let go."

Zarkon wanted to laugh. "Let go? The way you have let go, Alfor? The way you have learned not to meddle in the business of peoples and planets who neither need nor want your 'guiding hand?'"

Zarkon's words hit their mark, and Alfor's expression flickered, for a moment, to cold fury. Zarkon wondered how many times Alfor had interfered with local politics, had leveraged Voltron as a threat in negotiations without ever telling any of the paladins he had turned into his own personal bargaining chip.

After only a moment, however, Alfor returned to his usual kingly calm and lifted his chin. "It's been five weeks, Zarkon. You've had more than enough time to stabilize the situation. It's time you return to the castle. I'll deal with whatever mess you leave behind."

And, oh, that rankled. The Black Lion was well and truly angry now--angry on Zarkon's behalf and angry on behalf of all the people Alfor had manipulated. Zarkon didn't know when Alfor had turned into a tyrant, or how it had reached this point without Zarkon realizing what was happening, but he was done.

"I'm not coming back," Zarkon said, and this time it was shock that ruined Alfor's perfect mask. He opened his mouth, but Zarkon went on speaking over top of him. "I don't trust you to handle the situation on Daibazaal. Frankly, I don't trust you to command Voltron. So the Black Lion and I will remain here."

"You can't do this, Zarkon."

"I can and I will, old friend. If you want your precious weapon back, you can do it over my corpse. I fight for the Galra now."

* * *

Zarkon regretted the battle at Ielta. All the princes did. At least, all the princes claimed they did. Zarkon did not trust all of them to truly desire peace, but they maintained their iron grip on Daibazaal and its resources. Zarkon needed to work with them. He needed not to pick fights over a difference of opinion.

The approach on Ielta had begun as a bluff, a show of strength they might leverage against the Domenata Cluster when they pushed for an easing of sanctions. Military posturing was the only advantage Daibazaal had in intergalactic politics; even Zarkon, loathe as he was to rely on violence, had to admit that. That was why he had gone, with Black, to lead the fleet.

If Alfor could leverage Voltron in negotiations, surely he wouldn't object to Zarkon doing the same.

But Ielta was prepared for them. Prepared for them, and prepared for a battle. The princes never even got the chance to open negotiations before the lasers were flying, thick and fast. Zarkon responded on instinct, taking Black in to target the defense structures. Many were located inside the largest cities, but Zarkon couldn't afford to think about that. This was about survival.

He didn't know about the weapon--another experimental one like the device that had poisoned the planetary crystal in the Hovent Sector. From the drawn expressions on the princes' faces after it was done, they hadn't expected such raw destructive power, either, but neither were they particularly taken aback by the asteroid field that remained in Ielta's place.

"It was necessary," Gorak told him. "If Alfor means to make an enemy of us, we need to show the universe that we will not be bullied. If the death of one world is the cost of our people's survival, then it is a cost I am willing to pay."

Zarkon said nothing, but it was with a heavy heart that he returned to Daibazaal to prepare for the inevitable fallout.

* * *

Zarkon tried, for what must have been the dozenth time, to reach out to any members of his old team. They hadn't answered him last night, and they didn't answer him today.

Until.

"Zarkon? It's Lealle. Things are... Things are bad. I don't think there's any other way to say it. ...Can we talk, just the two of us? Please, I--I don't want any of us to do something we're going to regret."

* * *

Lealle met Zarkon on a barren moon, with only a few spindly tree-like growths to break the monotony of the landscape. It was dark at the coordinates Zarkon had given her, and the stars overhead glittered like the crystals of countless worlds laid bare. Lealle set down her shuttle a few hundred feet from the Black Lion, and Zarkon looked up at her, surprise written on his face.

"I didn't think you would actually come," Zarkon said when she emerged. The atmosphere on this moon was thin, but it was breathable, for which Lealle was grateful. It felt wrong enough to be facing each other in paladin armor, something close to enemies at the advent of a war. At least this way, Lealle could remove her helmet, face Zarkon as a friend one last time. Zarkon pulled off his own helmet and held it against his chest. "At least... I didn't think you were serious about coming alone."

Lealle gave a weak laugh, wrapping her arms around herself. "Of course I was serious, Zarkon. When have I ever lied to you?"

She didn't mention that their other friends were even now planning how to take him down. If Lealle did her job right, it wouldn't come to that. There was just one question she needed to ask first.

"Zarkon... I'm sorry, but I need to know. I need to hear it from you. Were you really involved in that attack against Ielta?"

Zarkon froze, the horror and guilt on his face telling Lealle all she needed to know. Yes, he'd been there, but it wasn't as cut and dry as the story Alfor had presented. Maybe Zarkon had been trying to stop the battle. Maybe he hadn't known how far the Galra fleet was planning to take it. These and a thousand other maybes floated through her mind as she waited for Zarkon to speak.

"I didn't want this," he said at last, broken. Resigned. "I didn't want anyone to have to die, and if I'd known what would happen to Ielta, Lealle, I swear, I wouldn't have agreed to the princes' plan."

"The princes' plan?" Lealle couldn't help the little surge of hope these words brought. Zarkon looked up at her, and Lealle tried to control the pounding of her heart. "Zarkon, what happened? I've only heard second-hand accounts, and none of what they're saying makes any sense."

For a long moment, Zarkon was silent, watchful, like he was waiting for her to spit in his face. It broke her heart, to see him looking at her like that. What had she done to lose his trust?

Then, at last, he began to speak--haltingly at first, then with more confidence as Lealle listened, silent and without judgment. He laid it all out for her: the desperate situation on Daibazaal, the Galra's continued attempts at peaceful resettlement and the way their efforts kept getting shut down.

The way Alfor kept shutting them down.

"I've talked them down from attacks like these more times than I can count since I left for Daibazaal, but I can't justify it anymore. People are dying, Lealle, and Alfor has all but damned them himself."

Lealle closed her eyes, swallowing against a wave of pain and confusion. Alfor, turning his back on people in need? That didn't sound like him. But Zarkon was a good man, an _honest_ man.

Zarkon fell silent, his rage dissipating in the cool night air. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't... I shouldn't talk about him like that."

"If he's done the things you say he has, then I see no reason not to," Lealle said, forcing a smile. "And considering how much of the politics he handles without me, I really have no way to refute any of what you said."

"So you believe me?"

"I do," Lealle said. "If I'm being honest, I have a hard time believing the worst of either of you, but I don't believe you would make something like this up. Maybe... Maybe this is all a big misunderstanding. Maybe there's a way we can fix this."

Zarkon shook his head. "I've tried, Lealle. Alfor shuts me down at every turn." He sighed, then took a step backward. "Coming here was a mistake."

"What?" Lealle reached out for him, catching his wrist before he could go. "No. Please, Zarkon. Don't do this. We care about you. We care about Daibazaal."

"And what if I'm right, Lealle? What if Alfor is abusing his power? What if the only way to fix this is to stop him?"

Lealle's eyes burned, but she squared her shoulders. "We talk to him, first. The two of us together. I won't let him shut you down as long as you promise to listen to what he has to say, just in case there is an explanation. If you're right, we'll take it to the team. We'll take it to Altea, to the Alliance--I don't care. We'll go as high as we have to go to make this right, without sparking an all-out war."

"...You would do that?" Zarkon asked. "For me?"

She smiled, tears blurring her vision. "You're one of my best friends."

"But he's your husband."

Lealle made a face. "Alfor doesn't _own_ me, Zarkon. I'm a paladin first. If you tell me my husband needs to be stopped, then..." She could hardly believe the words coming out of her mouth and had to take a steadying breath before she could continue. "Then we'll stop him. Together."

* * *

Coran fell out of the mind-meld in a rush, a vice closing around his throat. He remembered in sudden, agonizing clarity Alfor's panic when he'd erased his own memory profile. Was this the reason for his shame? Had he realized that his actions had driven Zarkon to this? Had fractured the paladins down the center and gotten his own wife killed? (But... was any of that Alfor's fault? He hadn’t killed Lealle. He hadn’t killed Keturah. For all Zarkon in these memories seemed to genuinely want to do good, _he_ was the one who had attacked Altea. _He_ was the one whose empire had perpetrated countless slaughters. That wasn’t on Alfor.)

"That's _it?_ That's all they showed you?"

Pidge's voice was sharp, frustrated, and it resonated in Coran's chest. For all the viewing had revealed dark currents in the months leading up to the war, it left too many of Coran's questions unanswered. How had Zarkon gone from righteous anger in defense of his people to outright despotism? Why had he murdered Lealle when she only wanted to help?

Coran was angry, and hurt, and confused, and with the horrified silence filling the room he was all too keenly aware of _this_ team and what they must think of the ones who had come before.

Matt breathed in, then slowly pulled off his headset, his eyes fixed on the floor at the center of their circle. "Yeah. That's it."

"Fuck that!" Pidge cried, shaking off Karen's attempt at a calming gesture. "What about the rest of it? How did Zarkon go from all woe-is-me to murdering his own fucking friends?"

"I don't know," Matt said, his voice hoarse. "I asked the sage the same thing, but she just said that wasn't what I asked."

"But--"

"I get it, Pidge, I do, but Oriande is paranoid about its secrets. I wasn't going to get anything more out of them." Matt paused, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment as he steadied his breathing. "It is what it is. Not exactly what I expected when I asked my Question, but I there's nothing to do about it now but learn to deal with it." His eyes darted toward Allura, who hadn't responded to Pidge's outburst with so much as a blink. "I... I know this is a lot to process... _Vrekt_ , maybe I should have warned you ahead of time. Sorry. I just... I didn't know how to--"

"It's fine." Allura pulled off her own headset and stood, forcing a smile as she brushed off her knees. "Thank you for sharing, Matthew. That was very... enlightening." Her smile faltered, her carefully practiced decorum turning brittle as the tears gathered in her eyes. She swallowed, visibly straining for control, then cursed and turned away. "I think I need some time to process all this. Excuse me."

She was gone before anyone could say a word. Coran hadn't thought he could feel any worse after the vision, but his heart found new ways to shatter. As bad as this was for Coran, it had to be many times worse for Allura.

One last look around the room showed varying degrees of shock and sympathy on the other paladins' faces. Shiro and Lance had both moved as though to stand, and Coran suspected they were both contemplating going after Allura. Neither followed through on this impulse, however, and the rest of the team seemed hardly to have processed Allura's departure.

It was understandable. They'd all just had their perception of the previous paladins and of the war itself shaken, and it was going to take time for them to come to grips with that.

It was going to take time for Coran to come to grips with it, too, for that matter, but he could put that aside for now. Allura should not be alone. She might not be in a state to face her team, but Coran doubted very much that she would turn him away.

If nothing else, she could do with a hug from someone who understood.

Standing, Coran collected Allura's headset, then put it away, along with his own. He laid a hand on Matt's shoulder and squeezed, smiling as Matt looked up at him. "Thank you," he said. "I'm sure it wasn't easy for you to relive all that."

"Easier for me than for you," Matt said.

He wasn't wrong. But Coran just patted his back, nodded to Shiro, whose attention had turned away from Allura's retreat to his boyfriend's melancholy. They would take care of each other, Coran was sure.

He needed to go find Allura.


	30. Reframing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time: After returning from Oriande, Matt gathers the team to share what he learned from his Question--a glimpse into the months leading up to the war. A rift formed between Alfor and Zarkon after Zarkon discovered that Alfor had been interfering with the beleaguered Galra's attempt to find a new homeworld. Lealle, upon hearing Zarkon's side of the story, offered to help Zarkon stop Alfor's meddling and help the Galra people--without resorting to all-out warfare.

Allura sat alone in an empty room, her feet pulled up on the bench seat nestled beneath a wide, round window. Few places in the castle-ship had physical windows; more often it was a panel mounted on the wall that projected a live feed of the external view. But here, the castle's builders had gone to that extra length to incorporate a large, transparent panel, to reinforce it against the strain of launch, of battle, and of the various dangers one so often encountered in deep space.

A room full of display panels or holographic projectors might give the impression of drifting through open space, but here in this room, the lights turned down to a bare reddish glow and the cool smoothness of the window against her cheek, Allura felt closer to the void than she ever had before.

Black's presence lurked at the edge of her awareness, watchful and concerned, but Allura couldn't muster the civility to talk to her without launching into a tirade. It wasn't Black's fault that Zarkon's split with his team wasn't as clear cut as Allura had always thought. If anything, the things Matt had showed them helped Allura understand how Black had stood by Zarkon as long as she had.

That didn't mean it didn't hurt.

 _Mother was true,_ Allura told herself. It was a small consolation, but she clung to it. Whatever blame there was to lay at her father's feet for how things had turned out, she could at least be sure that her mother was and always had been the kind, brave, selfless woman Allura had loved so dearly. Her mother, Coran, Rukka, Sa, and Keturah--they were all _good_ people.

Zarkon had been a good person.

It hurt all the more to know that the atrocities he had committed had started from a genuine desire to save lives, but Allura _had_ to remember the atrocities. When she looked only at how it had begun, she found it all too easy to sympathize with the man who had slaughtered her people.

No.

She felt no sympathy for Zarkon. She ached for the people of Daibazaal, who deserved none of what Alfor or Zarkon had done to them. She empathized with the Black Lion, who had seen Zarkon's admirable intentions and had trusted him to stay true.

And she hated her father. For abusing the power with which he had been entrusted. For making mistakes, small mistakes, easy mistakes that anyone might have made. (Grave mistakes, catastrophic mistakes, compounding mistakes that he should have recognized and stopped long before it came to open warfare with his own black paladin.) She hated that he'd shut everyone out, had used the paladins as leverage in political games and then had turned around and hid what he'd done. The monarch and the black paladin were meant to be equals, to balance each other and ensure that neither stepped out of line.

That was what hurt the most, Allura thought. Her father had known, _must_ have known, that what he was doing was wrong. Why else would he hide it? Why else distract the paladins with training and deflect Zarkon's questions and erase his own memory profile? His guilt was plain to see, and in the face of that guilt, how could Allura do anything else but condemn him as--as--not quite as the tyrant Zarkon had believed him to be. Allura wasn't prepared to go to such lengths yet. She wasn't sure she ever would be.

But Alfor had been wrong. He had misused the power and authority of Voltron, interfered in local politics without cause, and prolonged the suffering of millions of innocent people who had once looked to him for protection.

So where did that leave her? Zarkon was a monster of such magnitude that Alfor's misdeeds couldn't begin to compare, but Alfor was no hero, either. Her head kept spinning, her opinion of their split changing continually until she wasn't sure if she was unfairly vilifying her father or contorting the situation in order to exonerate him.

With a sigh, Allura pulled her legs closer and pressed her head harder against the window. Her breath fogged the glass, obscuring the stars outside, but she didn't care. The view wasn't anything special, and her mind kept looping back towards the memories, anyway.

The door hissed open, and Allura tensed, trying to catch a reflection in the window that might tell her who had found her. Possibly one of the castle staff; they'd been trying to get the unused wings back up and running as the castle took on more refugees, more Guard pilots, and more diplomatic visitors. With luck, they would recognize they'd intruded on one of the paladins and either withdraw at once, or finish their task quickly and without disturbing her.

The footsteps only hesitated in the doorway for a moment, however, before they crossed the room to the bench seat in the window.

"Allura," Coran said. Just that and nothing else, but it conveyed so much grief and sympathy that tears sprung at once to Allura's eyes. She looked up at him and saw her own heartbreak and inner conflict written plainly on his face.

Of course he would be hurting after this. He'd loved Allura's parents, too.

Allura said nothing as she turned to make room for Coran on the bench beside her, and as soon as he sat, she leaned into him, clutching at his shirt. She'd managed to mostly not think about him, or about any of the people she'd left behind, while she was off training with Master Fligg, but it hit her now with the force of a supernova. She'd been gone for half a year. The castle, the coalition, and the team had all survived without her, but _she_ had missed them.

Coran held her close, rocking her gently as she began to cry. They were the slow, silent tears of a low-burning ache. She didn't sob, and she didn't hiccup, but she couldn't stop the tears from falling, and she couldn't help the way her breath turned shallow and tremulous. She cried for her father's death and for Zarkon's descent into cruelty and vengeance. She cried for her mother, who had only ever wanted peace. She cried because she was _angry_ , and it was anger with no outlet. She couldn't scream at her father for lying to her, she couldn't bring herself to hate Matt for unearthing those lies--though part of her wished she could have gone on ignorant of her father's failings. She could be angry at Zarkon, but a black paladin couldn't afford to let anger rule her.

So she cried on Coran's shoulder, and when Coran momentarily let go of her to wipe away his own tears, she squeezed him all the tighter, their shared grief pouring out into the silence.

It reminded her of another night, so long ago now, when Coran had held her in a room like this, looking out over the stars. It had been fear they shared, that night. Fear of the Vkullor razing the planet Daibazaal, fear for Allura's mother, whose lion had taken a terrible hit shortly after Voltron entered the battle.

"What do I do?" Allura asked. It had been some time since Coran arrived, and she still clung to him like the scared child who had no experience with battle or with death. Letting the tears fall, however, had loosened her throat, though her voice was still thin. "What am I supposed to do with this?"

Coran opened his mouth, but no words came out. He sighed, tucking her head under his chin, and carded his fingers through her hair. "I don't know, Allura. I honestly don't."

"We'll need to talk to the coalition," she said, straining to force her spiraling thoughts toward something productive. If she could make a plan, if she could put her thoughts in order, then maybe it would all stop hurting so much. "Put safeguards in place. Voltron is too powerful a weapon to become the centerpiece of government on any scale. I will not allow it to become a tyrant to fill the void Zarkon leaves behind."

Her stuttering words tapered off, but her mind kept going, turning over proposals she might raise with the ambassadors. She and Shiro would have to take a step back, of course. Just by participating in talks, they risked imposing their will on their allies. It didn't matter if they meant their words as an ultimatum if the rest of the universe was too scared to disagree, for fear of drawing the paladins' ire.

"Allura," Coran said. "Allura, look at me."

She did, fighting to quiet her racing thoughts.

Coran tucked a stray curl behind her ear, then left his hand resting against her cheek. She leaned into his touch. "You don't have to make these decisions today. Give yourself time to think, to _breathe._ Speak with Shiro and with the coalition, and _then_ decide what needs to be done."

It was profoundly reasonable advice, and Allura wrinkled her nose at it, which made Coran chuckle.

"You are an incredibly wise woman, Allura, with a tremendous heart and unquestionable integrity. The fact that you are willing to surrender your authority for the good of the coalition is admirable--but it's not something that should be done out of fear. You need to have the freedom to act and the ability to communicate with our allies, many of whom are still shaking off the lies Zarkon has spread for generations."

Coran got a faraway look in his eyes, his thumb wiping away a tear. "I hope the day comes soon when the universe enters a new era of peace, an era in which you won't be needed as a leader and commander for the free people. An era in which you can just be Allura, without any of the pressures that come with being a princess and a paladin. But right now, we are at war, and the universe needs Voltron. It needs you. Don't be afraid to trust yourself."

She turned her head, shying away from Coran's words. "Are you saying that because I'm a better person than my father was?" She paused, her chest constricting as her thoughts turned back toward her father's misdeeds. " _Was_ my father a good man?"

"He was a man," Coran said. "I don't know if he was good or bad or something in between. I don't think I'm qualified to judge that. I know he loved you and your mother very much. I know he wanted to put an end to suffering in the universe..." He sighed, bowing his head until his forehead rested against Allura's hair. "I also know, now, that he made grave mistakes and hurt a lot of people. Those facts are not mutually exclusive, unfortunately."

"Do you hate him?"

"I... I am angry," Coran admitted, his voice cracking. "And hurt. I disagree with some of his decisions. Many of his decisions. But I also loved him. I loved him then, and I love him still."

It was a relief, to hear him say it. Like cutting away armor to reveal a wound underneath, it hurt, and fresh tears welled up. Coran loved her father. Allura did, too. Admitting that _hurt_ , but it was better to see it, to accept the fact of it, and to begin to address the hurt that surrounded it, rather than leave it to fester out of sight.

Allura turned into Coran, hugging him tightly once more. She wasn't ready to face her friends yet, much less the rest of the universe, but she hurt a little less now than when the visions had first faded.

Thankfully, Coran didn't seem to be in a rush to go anywhere. He shifted, leaning back against the wall of this small alcove, and Allura leaned against him, her head on his chest. They sat there, together, staring out at the stars, as their tears slowly ran dry.

* * *

The silence that descended in the wake of Allura and Coran's departure hung over the team for the rest of the day. Pidge finally relented and let themself be ushered back to the med bay so Shay could get them in a pod to heal their ankle. Matt tagged along with his mother, Ryner, Keith, Shiro, and Akira. They walked in silence, Akira twice opening his mouth to say something before thinking better of it.

"Your injuries are not so grave as they probably seem," Shay assured Pidge from the other side of an opaque screen as Pidge changed into the medsuit for the pod with help from their mother. "Aside from your ankle, it is primarily bruising. A four hour cycle will suffice, although you will still need perhaps three weeks of stretches and strength training before you are back to peak condition."

Pidge dismissed the screen and tossed their clothes onto a nearby counter, wrinkling their nose. "If I stay in the pod overnight, will that speed up the second half of recovery?"

"Not significantly, I'm afraid. The pods can repair your damaged tendons, but they cannot strengthen them, any more than they could build muscle mass. You are going to have to do that work yourself."

Pidge's head lolled back, and they glared at the foot that was resting on a pillow, the splint still glowing faintly blue. "Fucking meatsack."

Matt stifled a laugh as Karen chided Pidge for their language, but his cheer didn't last long. They all headed over to the pod room, where Pidge continued to moan as Shay programed the pod with information from Pidge's scans.

"Seriously," Pidge said. "What am I supposed to _do_ if I'm laid up in the castle for three weeks? I can't just not do anything. I think the cabin fever might _actually_ kill me."

Ryner laid a hand on their head, a blend of amusement and exasperation on her face. "I'm sure you'll find a way to keep busy."

There was a knock on the door, and Val leaned her head in. "Sorry," she said. "Did I hear that right? You're going to be stuck here for three weeks?"

"Don't say it out loud," Pidge said, leaning backward in their hoverchair. "It makes it more real."

Val smiled in sympathy, pulling a book out of her pocket and fiddling with the corner of the pages for a moment. "Looking for a project?"

Pidge lifted their head, squinting at Val. "What sort of project?"

"Well..." Val rolled her head to the side, her gaze landing on Matt. " _Someone_ wasn't there for this part, Mr. I'm-going-to-charge-off-after-Zarkon-alone."

Beside Matt, Shiro stiffened, and Keith breathed out a curse. Matt rubbed his forehead. "Is this your way of suggesting Pidge spend their recovery taking digs at me? Because if so, I'm going to veto that plan right now."

Pidge grinned. "You can't veto me."

He glared at them, but Val held up her hands, the book dangling from one. "No. Sorry. I just meant--you weren't there when I asked my Question."

"Oh?" Matt stared at her, something in her tone making his mind go quiet, like a courtroom holding its collective breath as they waited for the verdict.

"I asked for a way to find people. To find Commander Holt, and Rax, and Rolo." Val held up the book, hurrying on as her words thundered through Matt. "They gave me this book, and another. Both of them have to do with Quintessence, so it sounds like, maybe, whatever we're supposed to do might build on what we learned with Fligg? Or something. Either way, I wanted to make scans of the books so we could all go through them. Two eyes are better than one, so two dozen have to be better than two, right?"

Matt didn't know what to say. All the wisdom in the history of the universe at her fingertips, and she used her Question to try to get them a lead on Matt's dad? That was-- Matt would say it was better than he deserved, after running off on the team the way he had, but it wasn't about _him_ , was it? Blinking furiously, Matt surged forward and threw his arms around Val. "Thank you."

She stumbled back a single step, then caught her balance and looped her arms under his, giving him a quick squeeze in return. "You don't have to thank me. We all want to get him back--get everyone back. If this can help at all, then it's more than worth the shit we had to put up with in Oriande."

Matt pulled back, nodding as he wiped his eyes, and gave her a smile. "All right. We'll get it scanned today, then, so that way when your cycle is done, Pidge--" He turned toward them, then trailed off when he saw Pidge and Ryner exchanging meaningful looks. "What?"

"Nothing," Pidge said. "Sounds like a plan. Are we going to get this pod started or what?"

Ryner opened her mouth to say something, but Pidge glared at her, and she gave it up, just shaking her head at Karen's quizzical look. "I have a computer set up to digitize records," Ryner said to Val. "I need to send a message to Meri, but after that I can help you with the scanning. You," she added, turning to Pidge. "Rest."

Pidge flipped a lazy salute, then let Shay position them in the pod to begin the cycle. Val gave Matt's hand one last squeeze on her way out with Ryner, and Matt ran his hands down his face, trying to steady his pulse. He knew Pidge had found a lead on their dad before Matt went to Oriande, but that obviously hadn't payed off yet. Attacking the problem from another angle, especially while Pidge was grounded, would take a load off both their shoulders.

Shiro came up behind Matt, resting a hand in the small of his back. "We're going to find him," Shiro said.

Matt looked up at him, taking a moment to soak in the sight of him. It had been way too long. _Way_ too long. For right now, Matt was perfectly willing to take Shiro's words as unequivocal truth, so long as it meant he could reach up and pull Shiro down into a kiss.

He did just that, smiling as he caught Shiro halfway through what was sure to have become another attempt at reassurance. Shiro stilled, then sank into the kiss, pulling Matt closer. When they broke apart, Shiro followed up with another kiss to Matt's forehead.

"I missed you."

"Mmm," Matt said, melting into Shiro's embrace. "I'm not leaving for six months again. Not happening. You can't make me."

"Seven months," Shiro said, "but I have to agree."

Matt jerked back. "Sorry, _what?_ Are you telling me were in Oriande for a _vrekking_ month?"

"Assuming you went right there after you called us last, yes."

Matt groaned, going boneless in Shiro's arms so Shiro had to catch him before he fell to the floor. "Fuck Oriande. That's all I have to say. Fuck Oriande, and fuck me for going back there."

"Going back?" Keith asked. He sounded alarmed, and his ears folded back as soon as the others turned toward him. He had yet to say anything since the mind-meld, and he'd lingered at the edge of the group ever since, like he wasn't sure he should be here. He ducked his head now, staring at a point several inches below Matt's face. "Why are you going back?"

"No clue," Matt said. "All I know is we ran into you, me, Akira, and Nyma, but from the future." He wiggled his fingers for emphasis, but his smile slipped after just a few seconds. "Considering how much I'm done with the whole Oriande experience right now, it's gonna take a vrekking apocalypse to get me to go back."

Akira frowned, eyes darting toward Shiro. "The three of us? You don't think--"

"It's nothing to do with Shiro," Matt said. "I thought the same thing, but future me risked the wrath of Oriande to save me the panic attack."

Keith crossed his arms. "Something to do with Red, maybe?"

"Maybe? I don't know what that has to do with Nyma, though."

"It is an odd group," Akira said. "You sure it was just the four of us?"

Matt shrugged. "Considering the commotion we caused hanging out for five minutes, I didn't get to hang around long enough to ask many questions. But I'm pretty sure it was just us."

"Huh."

"Well, there's no point getting yourselves worked up over that right now," Karen said, finally turning away from the cryopod. She'd already fussed over Matt for a full twenty minutes while they were getting ready for the mind-meld, but she hugged him again now, more insistently than before. "Even I know the life of a paladin is one big string of little emergencies. Let's deal with the ones in front of us right now, and we can deal with whatever it was that sent you back to Oriande when we get there."

Shiro nodded. "She's right. Let's not worry too much yet. We should go pick up the shuttle you guys left on Roya Vosar before the Empire gets any ideas."

"Good plan," Matt said. "Then, sleep?"

Shiro's smile softened, and he kissed the top of Matt's head. "Then sleep."

* * *

Rolo woke to screams.

He sat up, heart thundering, and reflexively backed against the wall. He'd spent half the day out roaming the halls of the prison, searching for some sign of what they'd done with Sam, and he hadn't stopped until he'd worn himself out so much he couldn't stay awake.

Judging by his slow, stumbling thoughts, he hadn't slept for long, and he scrubbed at his face with his hands as he took stock of the situation. Rax was crouched on the other side of the cell, eyes riveted to the door. It didn't look like he'd been sleeping, but the screams had obviously caught his attention, too.

Rolo's leg still throbbed, protesting the motion of scooting back against the wall. It wasn't like he could protect himself in this position any better than he could lying on the ground, but it made him feel more in control. Marginally more in control.

The screams.

For a long moment, that was all they were: the screams of another hapless prisoner. Screams of pain, or of fear, or of desperation. The hallways in this section of the prison made sound echo oddly, so it was difficult to say if there were words to the screams or even which direction they came from.

Or how far away. Rolo had been here for months, and he could count on one hand the number of other prisoners, past or present, dead or alive, he'd seen evidence of. He and Sam had theorized about it extensively--why the druids would limit their sample to the three of them when they could bring in as many prisoners as they liked. Sam said they must have been part of an advanced stage of the research. The other prisoners they'd seen must have been the last survivors of the previous stage, and the druids were being selective about who they brought into the experiments from this point forward.

So then who was screaming like that? A new prisoner? One of the other survivors, brought unusually close to these cells for some unfathomable reason?

Rolo gathered his strength, ready to step out and have a look, but even as he did so he noticed something else about the screams: they were drawing closer.

They were drawing closer, and still Rolo couldn't pick out any words--or the translator chip they'd implanted in his skull couldn't pick them out, at any rate. Lower, angry voices threaded through the screams with threats and curses, but the prisoner seemed not to hear anything.

The group was nearly to the door before, all at once, the translator kicked in. It was like a switch had flipped in his brain, suddenly throwing the shouts into focus.

"Just kill me! Are you bastards listening? Just kill me now! I won't do this. You can't make me do this!"

That was Sam's voice. _Vrekt,_ what had they done to him? Rolo gathered himself, ready to--to fight, to rip Sam away from the guards, to escape--to do _something_. Rax was at his side before he could do more than gather his good leg beneath himself.

"Wait," Rax whispered. "You'll only make it worse."

Rolo rounded on Rax, snarling, a scathing rebuttal ready on his tongue, but the first guard reached the cell door at that moment and threw it wide. Rolo was expecting it, but even so it sent a thrill of fear through him--doubly so when he saw the insignia of a guard captain on her chest--and he shrank back from the metal baton she brandished in his direction.

Sam came next, his hands cuffed and three guards wrestling him forward. One of them shoved, and Sam pitched forward, his tirade cutting off as he hit the floor. He lay there for a long moment, pushing himself up with his hands, one leg bent beneath him, the other trailing behind. Rolo could see him shaking from here, but he said nothing, did nothing, just stared at the floor with wide eyes.

Concern closed in around Rolo's chest, but the guards' sudden entrance, and their obvious aggression, held Rolo frozen against the wall, silently willing Sam to give some sign that he was okay. Rolo didn't tear his gaze away from Sam until the guards moved forward, giving Sam a wide berth.

"All right, half-breed," the guard captain said, testing her grip on her baton. "Your turn."

Sam's shoulder's tensed. It was all the warning he gave before he was on the guards, leaping at them like an animal going for the kill. For half a second, he actually seemed to be going for their throats with bared teeth, but then he pivoted, grabbing the baton dangling from the first guard's belt at the same moment he planted his feet and threw his shoulder into the man's gut. The guard toppled, the baton sliding free of its sheath, and Sam swung for the second guard's head.

Sam screamed, half fury, half pain, and stumbled back far enough for Rolo to see the suppression pistol in the guard captain's hand. Unlike an ordinary pistol, this model didn't fire slugs or lasers capable of physical injury, but it inflicted momentary paralysis on the target. But why was it _here_? The druids knew their experiments had given at least Rolo technopathic abilities. They had to know he could turn their weapon against them. Unless... They couldn't be immune to the effects of the suppression pistol, could they?

While Rolo was still debating the risks, Sam took action, a magenta sheen overtaking his eyes for a brief instant before the suppression pistol exploded, shredding the hand that held it and peppering two of the other guards with shrapnel.

Rolo cursed, yanking his leg back as the guards swarmed Sam, carrying him to the ground, then taking out their batons and beating him into submission. Each sickening _thud_ felt like a hot scoop carving out Rolo's viscera, and he swallowed against rising bile as he prepared to dive into the fray.

Rax grabbed him again, throwing him back against the wall with enough force to stun him.

"Stay out of it," Rax growled, low enough that the guards couldn't have heard over their own grunts and Sam's broken sobs.

Rolo yanked his arm out of Rax's grip. "They're killing him!"

"They're teaching him a lesson," Rax countered. "You jump on them, make them think he's inciting rebellion, and they _will_ kill him to teach _you_ a lesson."

Rolo wanted to argue, wanted to curse Rax for a coward, but his voice was steady, his eyes dull with hurt, and Rolo knew he wasn't voicing fears. He was speaking from experience, and that stole the strength from Rolo's legs.

The beating was mercifully short, though nothing about it besides the swift end could be called merciful. Sam was bleeding from half a dozen cuts on his face and forearms, his left eye already swelling. He whimpered when the guards turned back to Rolo, but it was clear he didn't have the strength to fight any longer.

"No," Sam whispered, stretching a hand toward Rolo, who hurried to comply with the guards' barked orders to stand. "Please, no. Please..."

Rolo's leg screamed at him as soon as he put weight on it, but the guards didn't care about his comfort. They dragged him toward the door, and Rolo hobbled along as best he could, knowing that the alternative was to be dragged, if not beaten for noncompliance.

He turned only once to look behind him, just before the guard captain, cradling her mangled hand against her stomach, pulled the cell door closed. Rax was already at Sam's side, gently turning him over to see the extent of his wounds.

At least one of them was in good hands.

* * *

"I can't believe you started your Jedi training without me," Matt said, clapping a hand to his chest in mock offense. "Did you seriously try to fight a gladiator blindfolded?"

Keith ducked his head to hide a smile as Akira gave Matt a shove. "Once," he said. "Briefly."

"You can watch next time," Keith added, grinning.

They were headed down to Red's hangar, ostensibly to work on their bond, but mostly because they were all bored and Matt wasn't in the mood for training. Flying was the next best thing, and as long as it was in Red, with all three of them, it technically qualified as strengthening their bond, right?

Also, Red hadn't seen Matt in seven months, aside from the brief encounter in the Heart, and Keith had already had to put up with two days of her whining at him to get Matt down to see her. (He got it; she'd been worried about him, and even before that she'd missed him. Keith had, too. But Matt had spent his time alternately fretting over Pidge and losing himself in Val's books in search of something that might help them find his dad. Red might very well have been yelling at him for two days straight and he just hadn't noticed.)

On the bright side, Matt seemed to have missed Red nearly as much as she missed him, and he leaped on the chance to go see her as soon as Keith brought it up.

Matt and Akira bantered all the way down to the hangar, laughing and shoving each other with considerably more familiarity than they'd shown before Matt went away. Not that they hadn't been friends before, because they had been. Akira had always stuck particularly close to the two of them, probably because of how close they were to Shiro. But this went beyond, 'You're dating my brother.' The two of them just... clicked.

Keith found himself slotting into their dynamic without much effort, too, even though he didn't have much to say as they talked about Jedi and the Force. (Keith had gleaned enough from sharing Matt's head to get the reference, but he was neck deep in something he only understood on the most surface levels.)

Still, it was nice. Hanging around with them. Heading down to see Red, who purred contentedly in the bond as they drew near, and almost trampled Matt when he walked through the door. Without missing a beat, Akira grabbed Matt's shoulders and steered him to one side so Red's paw narrowly missed his head.

"Careful! I'm squishy, remember?" Matt said, pouting up at Red, even as she lowered her head and butted up against him. The gesture made him stumble, and he laughed. He tried to maintain the pout for only another few moments, then gave in and spread his arms, giving Red as much of a hug as he could manage. "Missed you, too, girl."

Red rumbled again, and there was a desperate note behind the sound, worry and remorse layered over the happiness. Keith frowned, and Matt pulled back to look up at her.

"Everything okay?" he asked.

Red just opened her mouth to let them in. Keith led the way, once it became clear Matt wasn't going to. They found a place for Akira to sit along the wall of the cockpit, and they were both strapped in by the time Matt joined them.

His worry was plain for Keith to read in the bond--worry and confusion that only compounded when he saw that Keith had sensed a similar melancholy from Red ever since the visions. She still deflected their questions, promising as always that she would tell them someday, when she was ready. It didn't help them relax at all, but then Akira leaned forward, asking them what it was like to copilot, and Keith slowly sank into the trance-like state he'd come to associate with flying. He opened his mind to the bond, lowering the barriers so Matt and Red could see into his mind and him into theirs.

They flew, and Keith could almost sense Akira there, wide-eyed and fascinated by every moment of the flight. It was something so right that Keith couldn't hold onto his tension for long, and before he knew it, they were racing off across the stars, pushing faster and faster just to feel Red's power beneath their hands.

* * *

"And _this_ is supposed to be a bomb, but no one will give me the charge to finish it."

Zuza leaned her cheek on her fist, smiling as Arel stared, dumbfounded, at Bee's spread of gadgets. "That's..." Arel trailed off, turning over a portable grav-field modulator in his hand before setting it down beside an energy siphon. "That's too bad...? How old are you again?"

"Eleven," Bee said. "Why?"

Zuza had a pretty good idea what Arel was thinking--it was pretty much the default reaction to Bee's tinkering habits. Where in all the stars did an eleven-year-old find the time to build all of this? Even knowing she'd borrowed from the castle's junker, a cavernous storage space where all the defunct machinery went until it could be repurposed or stripped for parts, it was still impressive. Matt had found her manuals for a number of simple Altean gadgets before he left for his training, and Bee had conned several more out of Pidge since then, but Zuza had to admit she was impressed with how polished it all looked.

Arel struggled to find words for a few more minutes before he gave up and sat back in his chair, watching in silence as Bee went back to her tinkering. She'd run out of new projects nearly three months ago and had built some of the devices so many times she'd grown bored with it. Most recently, she was dismantling the things she'd built and swapping out parts here and there to see what happened.

It was probably fine. Zuza was no mechanical genius, but Zelka had put her foot down on any parts that had the potential to explode, ignite, or otherwise cause bodily harm if mishandled, so in theory the worst Bee could do was fry a couple circuit boards, or maybe give herself some minor shocks.

Compared to the life they'd had on Revinor, this lab was the pinnacle of safety, and Bee loved every minute of it.

She was also rapidly sliding back into an intense focus, which meant it was probably time for Zuza and Arel to go. Bee didn't mind people watching her work, unless she deemed them too distracting, at which point she lost patience fast. After getting chased out of the lab by a hovering platter that kept divebombing her head, Zuza had learned to see herself out early.

"So?" Zuza asked, jostling Arel with her shoulder.

He glanced over at her, his stumpy little ears twitching like they wanted to lay flat. "So...?"

"What do you think? You've seen most of the castle by now, met a good handful of the people who live here.... Pretty cool, right?"

He scoffed.

Zuza crossed her arms, angling her course so she was leaning up against him. He tried to duck away from her, but the hallway wasn't that wide here. "Come on," she said, slowing to match his pace as he tried to get behind her. "Admit it. You like it here."

He gathered himself to run, then abruptly changed direction when Zuza went to follow his lead. He slipped behind her, spun around to her other side, and took off walking so fast Zuza had to jog to keep up. "It's... all right," he said. "For a military vessel."

It was Zuza's turn to scoff. She'd spent the better part of five days with Arel at this point, ever since Lance had pulled her aside to explain the situation and ask her to keep Arel distracted. Neither of them wanted an Arel-Keith showdown on the training deck. (Well... Lance didn't want that. Zuza thought it might be pretty entertaining. But she also recognized that they were going to have to be at least somewhat civil when they got back to the homeworld, and tensions boiling over probably wasn't going to help that.)

Regardless, Zuza felt like she'd garnered a decent enough understanding of the guy. He was snarky and paranoid and had a chip on his shoulder the size of a rocket launcher--but Keith was little more than a convenient target, she was pretty sure. Arel had taken his anger out on Zuza plenty these last few days, accusing her of conspiring with Keith to keep him in the dark, among other things that had even less truth to them. He regarded almost every new face with suspicion and tore his own room apart in search of bugs twice.

The way Zuza figured, It wasn't Keith he had a problem with at all. Arel didn't know him well enough for that. No, Arel's grudge was against the Empire (which was understandable; Zuza had days she just wanted to watch it all burn, too.) Keith just had the bad luck of being tied to the Empire enough to make Arel's danger sense sound the alarm.

The shrill hum of unfocused transmissions filled the air, coming from a door that stood open a short distance down a side hallway. Arel's steps slowed, his head cocking to the side as the hum cleared, and an indistinct chatter replaced it.

"What is that?" Arel asked. "Is that an Imperial broadcast?"

Zuza swiveled her ears toward the sound. It was too soft for her to make it out, but she heard other voices, excited, underneath the transmission. Wyn and Maka.

Zuza smiled. "Let's go see." She tugged on Arel's arm, leading him down to the open door of the workshop the two boys had taken over. They were bent over a small, cobbled-together transceiver, Wyn jiggling his foot as Maka fiddled with something on the back of the box. Both jumped when Zuza knocked on the door frame, Maka instantly shielding the transceiver with his body like it was a top-secret military project no one else was supposed to know about.

Should've thought of that before they left the door open, though, shouldn't they?

"Hey," Zuza said, leaning her arm against the door frame. Arel shifted behind her, peeking around her shoulder. "What are you guys up to? Finally get your receiver working?"

Maka shot Wyn a glare. "You told her?"

Wyn smiled innocently. "No?"

"Sorry," Arel said. "What's going on?"

"We're building a deep-space scanner to pick up transmissions from the Empire," Wyn said. "It was Maka's idea."

Maka went on pouting for a moment, then retreated to his chair beside the table, leaving the device in full view. "We're _trying_ to, anyway. Can't get it to work right."

"What kind of reflexor are you using?"

Maka narrowed his eyes. "Why?"

"Because--" Arel caught himself and shrank back, looking suddenly guilty. "It sounds like that might be the issue. I work with transmitters a lot on the homeworld. I've had to fix some busted ones, build a few from scratch. I know a thing or two about what makes them break."

"Huh." Maka spun the transceiver around, popping off the back panel. He hunched over the device, glanced over the top at Wyn, then slowly turned to Arel. "You have any recommendations?"

Zuza smiled as Arel joined the two boys at the table. He wasn't a bad guy, really. A little rough around the edges, a little harsh from the life he'd lived, but who wasn't? The Empire either crushed you, or it turned you into a soldier, and either way, trust was hard to rebuild after that sort of life.

But the castle-ship was good for that kind of rebuilding. Zuza knew Arel wouldn't be here for long, but she liked to think it was helping him, being around the kiddos like this. Seeing that there was more to the universe than an ancient war. Would it help the situation with Keith? Maybe. Maybe not.

It seemed like a good thing to do, anyway.

* * *

Allura took one night off after the emotionally charged mind-meld session. After that, she was back at work, frantically diving into the diplomatic records to bring herself up to speed and reaching out to allies and neutral parties to reinforce the bridges the rest of the team had begun to build.

Lance watched it all from afar, trying to figure out at what point it was okay for him to step in. It wasn't really his place, after all, to tell Allura that she was hurting herself. She was older than him, she outranked him both on the team and outside it, and honestly, she probably had her shit together way better than him.

She also wasn't doing well.

He couldn't blame her for that. Almost a week later and he still felt a little bit uncomfortable every time he thought about how easy it was for Voltron to turn into a tyrant. How they had to be so, _so_ careful, once they actually brought Zarkon down for good, not to take up the reigns of his Empire and become the accidental rulers of everyone they'd tried so hard to free. And he'd never even known Alfor as anything other than someone from Allura's past.

So he fought with himself, and he watched Allura thicken her skin and rebuff any attempt at comfort with a smile and an apparently heartfelt thank-you. Coran got through her defenses, sometimes, and they didn't shut Shiro out in the first place, because of the nature of their bond, but if their support did anything to help ease her pain, it didn't show. She still walked through each day on autopilot, smiling and chatting like nothing was wrong, but then getting this far-off look in her eye.

Enough was enough. Lance had no clue what he could possibly do to help where Shiro and Coran had failed, but it was worth a try. Anything to keep her from working herself to the bone.

He caught her on the bridge one night, just a few minutes before the end of her shift. "Hey," he called, watching her tense as the door slid open. "Hunk made cocoa."

Flashing a lopsided smile, he held up two mugs, and he was rewarded with a soft smile from Allura in return. Taking this as invitation, he crossed to the black paladin station, where she sat reviewing files--probably more treaty drafts and records from Guard visits to planets that hadn't yet joined the Coalition.

Sitting on the armrest, Lance handed Allura one of the mugs of cocoa. "Thank you," she said, breathing in the steam before taking a long sip. (Alteans, as it turned out, had a much better tolerance for hot beverages, and Allura preferred to drink her cocoa when it was still hot enough to burn Lance's tongue.) He shook his head, blowing on his own cocoa as he watched the side of Allura's face.

"Riveting stuff, huh?"

Allura blinked several times before she pulled her eyes away from the display screen before her. "I'm sorry. What did you say?"

Lance nodded to the screen. "You're looking over the Guards' logs, right? I saw some of the ones Coran was reviewing yesterday, and I was almost asleep by the end of the first one! How are you not bored out of your mind right now?"

"I was trained as an ambassador from a young age, which involved an awful lot of paperwork. Though... I'll admit, there are more engaging chores on this ship." Chuckling, Allura closed out of the records and sat back, focusing her full attention on the cocoa. "This really is wonderful. Remind me to thank Hunk next time I see him."

"Eh, he was making a batch for the Unity party, anyway." (Which was true. Though Lance may have asked him to make a second, hotter batch for Allura.)

Allura sat upright, her eyes widening. "Oh! That's tonight."

"Yeah. Keith and I are going to have to head back to the homeworld soon, so we wanted to do it while we're all here." He paused, curling his fingers around his mug. "Well, mostly all of us."

Allura's smile turned bittersweet, and she got that faraway look in her eye. Lance cursed himself. Ryner had sent a message off to Meri after the fight against the false Green Lion, but no one had heard back from her. Allura hadn't mentioned trying to get in touch, but of course she would have. And apparently the result was still nothing.

With a sigh, Lance slouched down so he was leaning against Allura's shoulder. He didn't say anything--didn't tell her Meri was fine, or that he was there if she needed to talk. Shiro and Coran had probably said the same things already, and Allura had far more reason to listen to them than Lance.

"Is this the part where you tell me that the team won't think any less of me if I admit to being less that perfect? Or do we have to build up to that?"

Lance looked down at her, startled, and was surprised to find her smiling.

"Shiro told me you two had a talk," she explained.

Lance blew out a breath that ruffled his bangs. (When had those gotten so long? He was going to grow a mullet to match Keith's at this rate.) "He said that, huh?"

Allura leaned her head against his arm, sipping her cocoa. "He also said that you convinced him to try a little 'self-care,' and that it's been working better than he ever anticipated."

She looked up at him, downright smirking as he flushed. Okay, so he'd bullied Shiro into a spa day, and the two of them had developed a skincare regimen Shiro could keep up without taking too much time away from all his big, scary black paladin duties. Facials had turned into movie nights with whatever portion of the team was on the castle-ship that day, and Lance had sweet-talked Shay into giving Shiro a badly-needed massage just a couple days ago.

But that wasn't a big deal. That was just Lance giving Shiro some gentle nudges away from obsessing over every little memo to drift into his inbox.

"I'm glad he has you, Lance," Allura said. "From what I hear, he needed to let go of some of the stress."

"What about you?" Lance asked. His cocoa had cooled considerably by now, which meant it was probably safe to drink, but he went on holding it, glad for the solid shape of the mug between his hands. "How are your stress levels doing lately?"

"Lance..."

Lance held up his hands. "I don't expect you to open up to me or go all-in with the spa days or anything, but... you know you have people you can lean on, right? Talking with Shiro lately... It's made me realize how much of what you two do depends on people seeing you as confident and unflappable and whatever. I get it. I would hate it, but I get that it's something you have to do with the Coalition, or even with the castle staff. But with the team? You don't need to put on a show for us."

"That's not what this is about," she said. "I just... I'm not ready to talk about it. With anyone."

"You don't have to," Lance assured her. "If it's not talking you need, then that's fine. I just want you to be happy--to at least be headed in that direction. I know you must be feeling really shitty after everything, and I can't even begin to imagine what it's like. But you don't have to let what happened ten thousand years ago define you. You deserve to be your own person."

She stared into her cocoa for a long moment, and it seemed she was actually considering his words.

"All right," she said. "I'll... try. I'm not sure if this is something I can let go of, just like that, but I can try to... take a step back every now and then."

"Like tonight?" Lance asked.

Allura smiled. "Like tonight."

He smiled back at her, then took a long drink of his cocoa. It was the perfect temperature, creamy and rich, and he hummed appreciatively. "Hunk's the greatest."

Allura chuckled. "He is. I'm sorry to have missed his and Shay's Unity."

Lance waved her off. "That's what tonight's for. Come on. Tev should be here soon."

In fact, Tev was almost there, opening the door just as Allura finally relented to Lance's cajoling and left her paladin station behind. Allura assured Tev that all had been clear so far tonight, and he saluted before going to the forward bridge station to start a precautionary sweep of the area.

Lance led Allura out and down to the rec room, where the Unity party was just getting started. Val, Matt, and Allura had felt so bad about missing the actual Unity, and Lance was so much on board with another reason to celebrate the happy couple, that he'd taken it upon himself to organize a second reception. Which was sort of a first reception, since the Balmerans didn't do receptions. Still.

They were keeping it low-key, because they'd all been dealing with enough stress as it was. So tonight was really just a glorified movie night. Hunk had made snacks, mostly because he didn't trust anyone else to get the food right, Pidge had set up the projector with a selection of movies from Earth and around the universe, Lance had found as many board, card, and video games as he could, and that was as much planning as had gone into tonight. Most everyone was already in their pajamas--including Shiro, Lance was pleased to see. He'd even convinced Matt to put down his tablet, which had the scans of Val's books (though Val had just settled in on Nyma's lap to continue reading.)

Hunk beamed when Lance and Allura walked in, pointing them toward the table full of snacks and drinks (including more cocoa, which Allura made a beeline for.)

Lance's siblings had come too, dragging some of the Galra kiddos along--plus Wyn, who tried to get Lance to join the board game they were all playing in the corner. It didn't look like there was room for another player, but Lance joined Wyn's team for the next couple rounds, until Akira finally called for someone to put a movie on and Allura quietly suggested nail polish art--something she was especially good at, and which Lance would never pass up, not even if his life was on the line.

And by the time she was done, he'd even teased a laugh out of her. He'd call that a solid night's work.

**End Act II**


	31. Quintessence Theory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The team got a little bit of a break after the chaos of the last few weeks. Team Hogwarts is back from Oriande and has shared what they learned about the start of the war. Pidge is on their way to healing from the injury they received fighting the Dark Green Lion. Val has told the Holts about the books she got from the sage and the hope of another way to find Sam and the others. And Zuza even managed to get Arel to lighten up a little by taking him around to see the Galra kiddos.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you haven't seen, Duality is now two years old! Thank you so much to everyone who's come along for the ride. This story would not have happened without all your comments, bookmarks, kudos, all the asks on Tumblr, all the activity on Discord. Bird (Confused-Bird), Spazz (Spazzcat), and I wrote a little crossover thing to celebrate, so if you want, head on over and check out [_Akira Shirogane and the Accidental Interdimensional Road Trip._](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15627765/chapters/36286416)

"I hope I'm not being too much of a bother," Karen said, bringing up the table of contents on her tablet. She stared at it, uncomprehending, while Ryner dropped down from the maintenance space inside the Green Lion and wiped her hands on a rag.

"You're not," Ryner said. "It's nice to have some company, actually."

Karen raised an eyebrow. "Even when that company keeps asking you inane questions about Quintessence theory?"

Ryner chuckled, and she reached up to place her hand against Green's belly, letting her know she was taking a short break. Karen understood that much about the exchange, and Green's answering gratitude, the same way she understood so much with the bond: instinctually and with conviction despite not picking up on the hows and whys.

"Your questions aren't inane," Ryner assured her, taking a seat beside her at the work bench. They'd been down here for several hours at this point, Ryner repairing the last of the damage Green had sustained in the fight with the Green Lion robeast while Karen brute-forced her way through Val's books. "I'm being serious," Ryner added as Karen snorted. "I was a professor for more than half my life--and not the sort of professor who got into it for the students. There were a good few years I showed up for lecture and left absolutely everything else to my TAs, and Lubos help those poor souls who tried to take advantage of my office hours."

Karen laughed, switching off her tablet's screen and setting it aside. "Were the students that bad?"

"Not at all. I simply didn't have the patience for questions at that point in my life. I'd rather be working with peers on the cutting edge of the Arts. The idea of explaining basic concepts to students who had never encountered them before confounded me, and after two or three students came to ask about the same thing, I'm afraid I got rather snappish with them."

"Really?" Karen swiveled her chair to face Ryner, eyeing her. "I've known my share of ornery academics, both among Sam's colleagues and from my law school days. I wouldn't have pegged you for that type."

Ryner reached for a seed tray that she'd left on the edge of the table and started growing miniature pods from the sprouts in several of the wells. "I grew out of it. I fell into the career backwards because the university offered resources I wasn't likely to get anywhere else, but the constant interruptions from students encouraged me to become a better professor, in a roundabout sort of way. I figured if my lectures were better, clearer, more engaging, I would get fewer questions after class. Which was true, to an extent. The part that surprised me was how much I enjoyed the challenge of teaching, once I'd made up my mind to be better at it."

"There's no better motivator than spite," Karen said.

Ryner smiled, tipping her head in silent commiseration. It was the immediate camaraderie Karen had often encountered among her fellow women lawyers, and among the accomplished women at the Garrison. The meaningful looks that said, _I know how much you had to fight to get here, and I respect you for it._ The in-jokes and pet peeves that were almost universal to women in male-dominated fields. Karen wondered what hurdles Ryner had faced in her career. Karen liked to think that aliens weren't all cursed with the same rampant bigotry that plagued humanity, but she was too much a realist to believe in a society without ingrained biases.

The pods Ryner was growing finished quickly, and three small devices unfolded in her palm. Karen didn't recognize them, and Ryner offered no explanation as she absent-mindedly fiddled with them. "I grew to love teaching," she said. "Though I didn't realize it until the Empire chased us out. I missed the university for the resources, certainly--our little rebellion would have been much stronger in those early days if we'd had the means to properly defend ourselves. But more than that, I missed my students, and I was grateful when I got the chance to teach and train the youths who joined my cell. So don't berate yourself for asking questions. It really is quite nice to be able to share what I know."

Karen was scarcely aware of the guilt tightening her chest until it loosened, and she smiled at Ryner before picking up the tablet once more. "In that case, I really would like to know anything you can tell me about Quintessence. Even just the basics, honestly. I don't think this book is going to be any good to me until I have a little more of a foundation."

"Of course." Ryner set down the devices she'd created. "Where would you like to start?"

* * *

However she'd started her professional life, Ryner was actually a good teacher, despite the difficulty Karen had grasping some of the nuances of Quintessence. She understood the part about it being a type of pseudo-mystical energy that (nearly) all living things needed to live. She understood the part about habitable planets producing Quintessence in their core crystal, and about Earth's crystal dying in the war. She understood well enough the effects of Quintessence deprivation on living creatures, though she didn't like to think about it.

It was more difficult to wrap her head around the physical science of Quintessence--the various models for what Quintessence _was_ , many of which had been thrown off by the discovery of synthetic Quintessence, which functioned much the same as ordinary Quintessence but existed in a liquid state. Not to mention Quintessence signatures, which Ryner compared to both blood typing and waveforms, neither of which were exactly Karen's area of expertise. She gathered that everyone had a unique Quintessence signature that could be used in biometrics or identification, which implied that the core of the signature was stable. But Olkari scholars and Alteans before them had developed complex models that could predict certain aspects of Quintessence signatures based on stressors, environmental factors, activity, and general health, which were clearly more malleable.

And that wasn't even touching on the various mechanisms by which species passively consumed or actively channeled Quintessence toward various ends.

At some point, Karen's brain stopped processing Ryner's lesson, and they turned their attention back to Green. There were only a few repairs left to do, most of them minor or well hidden, but Karen wasn't as much in the way as she would have expected. Maybe Green was going out of her way to include Karen, or maybe it really was more efficient to route advice through her. Green's preferred form of communication was scent, after all (a fact that caught Karen off guard the first time she thought it). So maybe it was easier to count on Karen's innate knowledge of Green's status than for Green for force herself to use words specific enough to point Ryner in the right direction.

When they'd finished, Karen picked up her tablet, tapping one fingernail against the case as she debated going back to her research. She was burnt out, though, and she could probably do with a few more days of groundwork before she moved on, anyway.

Besides, this was good for her. She'd been slacking on her adjunct duties for too long now, first by avoiding the castle-ship and the ethical dilemmas it raised, and then by focusing all her energy on Pidge. Ryner was a green paladin, too, which meant that Karen had equal responsibility to support her.

And it was nice to be able to spend time with someone besides Coran and not have to be the adult in the room.

It was getting late by now, Karen and Ryner having been down with Green since a little after lunch, so they packed up. Ryner washed the grease from her hands, and they headed out for dinner.

They were halfway there when Keena rounded the corner up ahead of them, her steps slowing as she caught sight of Karen. Karen's blood went cold, and she fought the urge to run the other way. She'd barely spoken to Keena since the summit. She'd barely _seen_ Keena. The woman kept to herself these days, and Karen couldn't help but find that suspicious.

"Karen, hey!" Keena said with her usual cheer. It sounded more saccharine than ever to Karen's ear, and she barely suppressed a scowl. "How've you been?"

"Fine," Karen said, forcing a smile. She drew in a deep breath, suppressing her courtroom instincts to press until she found a chip in Keena's charming veneer. Casual was the better tack here, at least while Keena was still feigning sincerity. Before Karen could dredge up some innocent small talk, though, Keena brushed past her, continuing on her way without missing a beat. Karen turned, holding tight to her suspicion, and called out after her. "Where are you off to in such a hurry?"

Keena turned, continuing to walk backward down the hall. "You know. Things to do."

That wasn't an answer at all, but Keena didn't stick around for the cross-examination, and Karen watched her go, unease simmering in her gut.

"There's a story there," Ryner said mildly, glancing between Karen and Keena's retreating back.

Karen sighed, running her hands down her face. "I keep thinking the same thing. Unfortunately, I'm almost as much in the dark as you are. She's up to something--I know she is. I just can't figure out what."

"You think she's a threat?"

Karen hesitated. "She hasn't done anything to give me that impression..."

"You don't sound very confident," Ryner pointed out.

Karen only shrugged. She wasn't sure of anything where Keena was concerned. The woman seemed on the surface to only want to help the war effort, but how much of that was genuine, and how much was an act?

"I've been developing surveillance devices modeled after spores," Ryner said, almost too casual. "Difficult to detect and even more difficult to get rid of. Scatter some in a room, perhaps dust a closet or a bed..." She trailed off, then slowly flicked her eyes Karen's way. Her smile was subdued, even bland, but there was a ruthless gleam in her eye that caught Karen off-guard.

"Are you suggesting we spy on her?" Karen asked in a whisper.

Ryner lifted one shoulder, then continued on toward the elevator, unperturbed. "You need to be able to trust the people in your home base not to betray you. If you can't do that, then you've already lost."

Still Karen hesitated. The thought of bugging Keena's room or clothing--it left a sour taste in her mouth. It didn't matter that Keena had probably bugged plenty of other people in her time. Karen was her own woman with her own ethical code.

Ryner turned as she waited for the elevator doors to open, sympathy softening her face. "It's a difficult choice. One I was unable to make for many years. And I still have to run a few tests on my spores anyway. Take some time to think about it, and we'll talk about it again later. All right?"

"Sure," Karen said, though she wasn't feeling very sure at all.

* * *

One thing Val would say about her gift from Sage Ellorn: it was certainly interesting. She'd gone through the entirety of _Manifestations of Quintessence_ in about two days, but it hadn't turned up anything immediately useful. As far as she could tell, it was basically an encyclopedia of different ways Quintessence could be used, divided up into chapters based on some obscure categorization system. Some of the categories, like elemental expression and healing properties, seemed to be distinguished by the aspect of Quintessence itself that was at work. Others were grouped by type of ability--manifestations related to sensation, like Matt's ability to see currents of Quintessence in the air or the Alteans' natural Quintessence sense. But some of the chapters did some strange feats of contortion to link the abilities together.

Take chapter nine: Imitative Manifestations. Val wasn't sure what she'd been expecting to find here, but certainly not the list she found, which ranged from "Shapeshifting" (a la Alteans) to "Illusions (Complex)" (distinct from the simple sensory illusions that were listed in chapter five under Sensate Manifestations) to "Self-Replication and Bilocation" (because bilocation was apparently more about creating a replica of herself than about positioning, which would have put it in chapter four, Transportative Manifestations.)

It was all fascinating, of course. All the more so because, in theory, she ought to be able to learn any of these abilities. But she also spent more time trying to wrap her head around classifications than anything else. She kept going back to chapter one, Principles of Quintessence Manifestation, which attempted to set forth limits for what was possible and impress upon the reader just how varied expression could be. Or to chapter two, Common Themes, which listed other classification systems that existed. Like the active/passive distinction, or internal/external, or constructive/destructive/neutral. (And that wasn't touching on the appendix at the end that simply listed which species presented with which passive manifestations.)

It wasn't really a big deal, in the end. Sure, Val would have a hard time knowing where to look for specific manifestations, but the book wasn't all that thick--maybe eighty or a hundred pages--and she'd already ruled out her initial list of easy fixes. There was no straight-up tracking ability, or information-gathering spells, or anything about using familial bonds as spatial orientation. (Though, interestingly, there were some references to bonds in chapter ten, Metaphysical Manifestations, that sounded a lot like paladin bonds and _could_ have the kind of effects she was looking for.)

She considered marching down to the Black Lion's hangar and asking her if there was some way she could make Commander Holt an adjunct, but she thought that might be kind of rude, especially considering it probably wasn't possible when Black had never met Sam in the first place. And it wouldn't do anything for Rax or Rolo.

 _Well of course I wasn't going to find an easy answer in here,_ Val thought, setting _Manifestations_ aside and turning her focus to _Quintessence Theory, DVE._ Ellorn had specifically told her that she was doing something new. Which was both exciting and terrifying. She knew, logically, that _someone_ had to be the first person to develop a technique, but that didn't stop her being bitter that Ellorn couldn't have just given her her own notes from the future.

So. Theory it was. Even if she got lucky enough to not have to build a new technique from the ground up, she'd probably have to figure how to use an existing technique in a new way, which required either a lot of luck or a solid grasp of what the technique was actually doing in the first place. Not just the effects, but the mechanisms. You couldn't MacGyver the shit out of magic if you couldn't see the pieces you had to work with.

Unfortunately, the theory book was three times thicker than the other and about ten times as dense, and she _still_ didn't know where to start. How did you go about finding someone the Galra Empire wanted to make disappear? She had some examples of teleportation and telepathy abilities to build off of, if she could figure out how to majorly boost the range and target them to a specific person. Which was a big if. Some kind of tracking spell sounded simpler in theory, but she hadn't seen anything she could use as a starting point for something like that. Maybe she should try to take advantage of the fact that all souls were connected to the astral plane. Movement there was already weird, but Val had gotten by alright when she went to find her friends. Maybe she could do something similar to find Rolo and everyone else?

After the first chapter of the theory book, Val groaned and set it aside. "I think my head's going to explode before this is over," she said, leaning back and stretching her hands over her head.  
  
Sebastian looked up from where he sat, curled up against the opposite arm of the couch. They'd claimed one of the smaller lounges for the afternoon, trying to strike a balance between comfort and distractions. It had worked well so far. It was just the books that weren't cooperating.

"Too much info," Sebastian asked, "or not enough?"

"Both." Val sagged, sliding down on the couch until her hips were barely hanging onto the edge of the cushion. "Too much information with not enough context, and nothing that's immediately useful to me."

He scrunched his face up in sympathy. "Sounds like every science gen ed I ever had to take."

Val laughed, maybe harder than she should have. She loved Lance dearly and would always support his space-related aspirations, but she was with her brother on the topic of science as a migraine in waiting. She'd done okay in high school biology, but chemistry was a Mobius strip of murky logic and all it took was one look at Lance's physics homework to make her eyes glaze over.

"Sorry I've been such terrible company today," she said. Her mind kept trying to tease apart the mysteries of the universe, but she knew herself well enough to know that that was the opposite of helpful. "I ask you to hang out and then ignore you all day? Who does that?"

"It's fine," Sebastian said. "I haven't exactly been chatting your ear off, either."

It was true, now that Val thought about it. Sebastian had been quiet ever since she got back, withdrawn in a way that wasn't like him. He'd always been the type to find a quiet corner at a party to read, sure, but not--not in a distracted sort of way. He was always focused on something, even if that something wasn't people.

Well, he hadn't been distracted today. Val hadn't thought much of it, but the faint electronic buzz of keys as he typed had been a comfortable white noise for as long as she'd been reading.

She picked herself up out of her slouch and rested her elbow on the back of the couch. "What are you working on, anyway? You never said."

Sebastian looked up at her, flushing. "Oh, uh. Nothing really. Just a dumb little project I've been working on when I'm bored."

"Oh?" Val leaned her cheek on her fist. "I'm sure it's not dumb, whatever it is."

Still Sebastian avoided her gaze, drumming his fingers on the back of his tablet. "Okay, so you know how I've been spending a lot of time on the Balmera?"

"Sure."

"Well... I met some people who are trying to recover the pieces of their culture the Empire ripped away from them. Sharing legends and history and song. They let me sit in on some of their meetings, and a couple days I go I offered to help them create a sort of... database? A catalogue of stories so that as you free more Balmerans, they can add what they remember. There's not a lot of need for it yet, I guess, but maybe some day there will be so many free Balmera that it'll get hard to send representatives from every one to every other one to share stories directly. Or there will just be too many stories to share--especially if we find a Migration that was never conquered by the Galra."

Sebastian trailed off, his face positively crimson by this point, and Val gaped at him, her heart swelling.

"Sebastian!" she said. "That's not dumb at all. That's amazing!"

He looked up, uncertainty written on his face. "Yeah?"

"Absolutely. I haven't even been out here all that long, but I've seen plenty of people who've lived under Zarkon's rule so long they've lost a lot of who they are. Giving the Balmerans something like this is--it's really sweet. And you're right. We're going to free more of them before we're done. Starting the database now means less work down the road, which can only be a good thing."

Slowly, Sebastian returned her smile, hugging his tablet to his chest. "Yeah. It's... It's important to me. I don't know why, exactly, but it _matters_ , and lately I... It's just been a long time since anything I did seemed to matter."

Val's smile faltered, and she scooted over to lean against Sebastian's side. "You have been a little down lately. Everything okay?"

He shrugged. "Nothing's _wrong_. But nothing's really great, either, you know?"

Throat constricting at the dejected tone with which Sebastian spoke, Val looped her arms around her brother's waist. He was hurting--she'd seen that, here and there over the last few days when he thought no one was looking. She didn't know what to say to make his pain go away, or how to ask if she could help without just making him feel worse.

"Sorry," he said, stiffening in her embrace. "I don't know where all this self pity is coming from. Not like I'm the one out here fighting a war."

Val snorted. "Don't apologize, Sebastian. Come on. Not that the life of a paladin isn't hard, cause it is, but we've at least got the advantage of being able to stay somewhat in control. I know that, for me, the times I felt the worst were the times where things were bad and I couldn't do a damn thing about it."

"I guess..."

"I mean it." Val leaned back, taking Sebastian's face in her hands. "This isn't the Bad Shit Happens Olympics. We lost Lance, and then you lost me, and then you lost school and home and _Earth_? Your entire life has been thrown into chaos, Sebastian. That would mess anyone up."

Tears gathered in his eyes, and he jerked away like he was trying to hide before Val saw him cry. She let go of his face, but planted her feet on the couch cushion and levered herself up and over so she slid down into the narrow space between Sebastian and the back of the couch. Once she was settled there, she pulled Sebastian close, letting him hide his face in her shirt.

"I'm just--I'm scared to go back to New Altea," he admitted, his voice shaking. "I know we're safe there, and I should be grateful for that, but the whole time I was there it was like nothing was even real. It was just this horrible, awful numbness that never left me alone. I don't want to go back to that."

"Then stay," Val said. "I can't promise I'll always be around, but Tía Rosa will be. I know she's been lonely with me and Lance gone, even with Lana and Akani around. You can keep organizing histories, or you can help with any other refugees we pick up. Hell, Coran always has something that needs to be done, if you ever just need to keep busy. And I'll be back between missions at the very least. We can hang out then, if that would help?"

He shrugged. "Mom and Dad already don't like you being out here in all this. They won't like it if I stay here, too."

"I'll talk to them." Val squeezed Sebastian around the shoulders. "Or we can talk to them together, if you'd rather be there. The castle is safe, and you deserve to be happy."

Sebastian made an discontented noise.

"What?"

"I don't know. I just..." He shook his head. "No. I shouldn't be complaining. You've had it way worse than me, and you're doing fine."

Val laughed. "Fine is relative, kiddo."

He pulled back to pout at her, which only made Val grin. She hadn't called her brother kiddo since she started college and treated all high schoolers, Sebastian included, like kids. Good to know it still had the same effect.

"Seriously, though," she said. "Just because I can ignore my issues doesn't mean they're not there." She let her head loll back, an unexpected surge of melancholy sweeping through her. She'd helped liberate the prisons and labor camps on Olkarion before she left for her training, and that had been... rough. She hadn't expected it to be so hard to see those prison rags again, and she still wasn't sure how much of her decision to leave with Matt and Allura was practicality and how much was just her running away from all the other prisons in the Empire that might need her help.

Sebastian leaned his head on her arm, offering a sympathetic half-smile. "You're not just saying that, are you?"

"No. This war has screwed us all over in one way or another. Doesn't matter that you're not on the front lines; I've barely been there myself. But I can promise that I'll be there as much as I can when things get bad, and having you around might help me when I have to stop running. And... I heard Coran's looking to hire some therapists. Maybe once he does, we can both get some _actual_ help."

"Sounds like a plan." Sebastian closed his eyes, relaxing against her. "It's good to have you back, Val. I missed you."

"I missed you, too."

* * *

"Are you sure you're okay with this?" Keith asked, barely resisting the urge to tug on his ear. "She was your lion first."

Matt rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and took Keith by the shoulders. "Keith, hey. She chose us _both_. She's my lion and she's your lion, full stop. The difference here is that you guys are going out to the middle of nowhere where we can't get to you instantaneously if something goes wrong. I'll feel better knowing that you've at least got Red for backup."

Keith searched his face, the pressure on his chest lightening when he found no signs of suppressed resentment. "And you'll be okay without her?"

"I'll hitch a ride with Pidge or Takashi or something," Matt said, waving his hand. "Or take up a drone if it's gonna be all aerial fighting. There's plenty of ways I can make myself useful out here, even without Red."

"It might be a while," Keith warned. "We've only just made contact with the rebellion, and we haven't even figured out how we're supposed to unseat Zarkon's governors, let alone what to do after the fact."

"Then I guess you'll just have to hurry up and start a revolution, won't you?" Matt grinned, then pulled Keith in for a hug. "Don't worry about me. I'll be fine."

Part of Keith wanted to go on arguing, because he actually had tried fighting the Empire without a lion. It sucked. But Matt was insistent, and he was right--the others would be there, and Matt could go on missions with them. And with as often as Pidge was off following a lead on their dad, or Hunk and Shay planning to track down more Balmera, it wasn't like Keith taking Red would be the difference between having Voltron and not having Voltron.

So Keith nodded, his guilt easing. He hugged Matt back, hesitated a moment, then smiled as Akira pulled him in for a hug, too. Keith had already said most of his goodbyes, as had Lance and Thace. Lance was just saying goodbye to his family, and Luz darted over to tackle Keith as he separated from Akira and Matt.

"You're going to call home with Lance, right?" she asked, backing off and putting her hands on her hips.

Keith blinked, words failing him, and nodded silently. Luz beamed in response, then let her mom pull her away. The Mendozas filed out, Rosario blustering about lunch, while Matt and Akira lingered just inside the door, talking in low tones. Keith turned, his smile slipping as he took in the rest of the hangar, which was still conspicuously empty.

"Where's Arel?"

Thace frowned. "I'm not sure. I haven't seen him yet today. He does know we're leaving?"

Keith nodded. "Zuza said she'd pass the message along." She'd been running interference for the last two weeks, which was a welcome respite from Arel's attitude, though it did leave Keith more that a little queasy at the thought of being stuck inside Red's cockpit within for another long, tense flight.

Lance crossed his arms. "I don't suppose we could leave without him..."

"And tell Mirek what?" Thace asked. "Just because she's decided to trust us so far doesn't mean she'll appreciate us returning without her agent."

Lance wrinkled his nose, but offered no further argument. Which was a shame. Keith very much would have liked to "forget" Arel. It would certainly make the rest of the mission easier.

Unfortunately, the door opened at that moment, revealing Arel himself, who stiffened as his eyes locked with Keith's. Zuza appeared behind Arel a moment later and gave him a shove forward. He stumbled, caught himself, and glared over his shoulder at Zuza, who only grinned and gave Arel another nudge.

Sullen, he stomped forward, crossing the hangar with a purposeful stride. Behind Keith, Lance stiffened, and Akira actually stepped forward like he meant to intercept Arel on his way over, but Matt put a hand on his arm to hold him back.

"Vorsek," Arel said, his voice every bit as biting as it had been last time they talked. Keith's hackles raised automatically, and he bared his teeth. He'd tried to understand where Arel was coming from, but enough was enough. If he was just going to go on causing problems--

Zuza cleared her throat, and Arel's lips twitched into a deeper frown before, finally, he sighed.

"Zuzroka has given me quite a comprehensive tour of your ship these last cycles," he said--still stiff, but not quite so aggressive. "It's... impressive."

"Thanks?" Keith squinted, waiting for the inevitable _but_.

Instead, Arel only huffed, turning his head to glare at the far wall. "It's more than impressive. It's antithetical to everything I've ever seen of the Empire, far too much so to be a rebranding for the sake of subterfuge. Even if you somehow managed to find enough Alteans willing to cooperate, you'd never have been able to count on so many child actors keeping up the facade unsupervised. And Zuzroka could never lie to save her life."

Keith blinked, his arms falling to his sides, as Zuza positively beamed. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying you win," Arel said, fixing Keith with a glare that was, if anything, even more venomous than the last. "To go on accusing you of conspiring with the Empire at this point would be foolish."

"Oh." Keith relaxed, a smile tugging at his lips. "Well... thanks. That means a lot."

Arel's shoulders hitched, and he jabbed a finger at Keith's chest. "This doesn't mean I like you. You're still a coward and a barbarian, and I don't believe for a second that you could last through your Proof without absorbing their bloodthirsty rhetoric..." He faltered, taking a step back. "But I might be able to accept that you want to do the right thing."

"That's high praise, coming from you," Keith said, feeling oddly light, considering Arel's speech had been laced with insults and accusations. But--it was progress. It was a lot of progress, considering where they'd started, and Keith offered a genuine smile that seemed to catch Arel off-guard. He fumbled for a response, then huffed and stormed off toward the Red Lion, disappearing into her cockpit before anyone could stop him.

Lance whistled. "Wow, Zuza. What did you do to him?"

Zuza shrugged. "It was the kiddos, mostly. He spent like three full days with Wyn and Maka. I think he might have fallen in love with them a little bit--and trust me, if he thought they were in any danger here, he'd have taken them and run. The fact that they're both safe and happy went a long way to getting him to chill."

"Well, whatever it was that convinced him," Keith said, "thank you. This is going to make the trip back a million times less painful."

"Seriously," Lance muttered.

Zuza pulled them both into a hug, mussing up Keith's hair because she knew he hated it. "Don't even mention it," she said. "Arel's... He's been through a lot. You know how it is. The Empire isn't a nice place to grow up. He's touchy about it, but he's not a bad guy."

Keith glanced toward Red, who rumbled in vague agreement with Zuza. "Yeah," he said. "I'll try to remember that next time he calls me a bloodthirsty barbarian."

Zuza started to say something, but her words were lost to a rushing in Keith's ears as the elevator door slid open one last time and Keena stepped out, her eyes finding Keith's at once.

For a moment, Keith stopped breathing. He'd know she was here, somewhere. Karen had mentioned it in passing, watching Keith like she expected some sort of reaction. But Keith hadn't seen her. She'd skipped the Unity, or maybe she hadn't been invited in the first place, and she hadn't sought Keith out in the days that followed.

But now here she was, flashing a warm smile that curdled Keith's stomach and striding forward with her arms held wide like she meant to give him a hug. Keith watched her come, frozen in place, painfully aware of the others in the room. Matt and Thace knew what Keena had asked of Keith--usurping the homeworld government, positioning himself at the head of the rebellion, manipulating their forces and their loyalty all in the name of making himself the new Galra Emperor.

Keith still hadn't told Lance about that, much less Akira or Zuza. (And gods forbid Arel ever caught wind of that plan. He'd never trust Keith again.)

Keith braced himself, ready to murmur a few pleasantries and hope Keena didn't linger--and suddenly Thace was there, grabbing Keena's hand and pulling her into an embrace. It was so smooth Keith almost thought they'd rehearsed it, and it took him a moment to realize that it put Thace directly between Keith and Keena.

"Keena," he said, sounding perfectly cheerful to see her. "You made it. I was starting to think we were going to miss each other entirely."

Keena pulled back, the faintest touch of suspicion narrowing her eyes, and Thace's smile grew sharp.

"We were just leaving," Thace said.

The suspicion vanished from Keena's face, and she smiled at Keith around Thace's shoulder. "So I heard! I just came to wish you both luck, and to remind you that you can always reach out to me if you need any help."

"That's very generous of you," Thace said. "We'll keep that in mind. You're planning on staying on the castle, then?"

"Oh, no," Keena said. "I've got a seat on the shuttle headed back to New Altea this afternoon. Business to take care of back home, you understand."

The way she said it made Keith's skin crawl. She was up to something (when wasn't she?) and he didn't like it. But at the same time, he couldn't help the little piece of him that uncoiled at the thought of her leaving the castle-ship. Even if Keith wasn't going to be here, his friends were, and... _And what?_ he asked himself. What did he think was going to happen? Keena was going to start telling his whole team about the plan to make him emperor? How would that do her any good?

He still didn't like the thought of Keena being on the castle-ship long-term.

Thace, it seemed, was equally torn, but Keena just smiled and patted his cheek, then flashed another smile Keith's way. "Good luck out there, Keithka. I'll be in touch."

* * *

"You're certain."

"Yes," Meri said, exasperated. "How many times do you want me to say it, Ulaz? They found a video of him that included the order to transfer him to Vindication." Meri glanced over her shoulder out of habit, though they'd checked that the room was secure three times before Meri said a word. It was enough of a risk for her to be here, ostensibly a routine maintenance dispatch to Ulaz's base. She wasn't about to risk someone overhearing this conversation.

It wasn't just her and Ulaz on the line anymore. Sam Holt was part of Vindication. Ryner had been crystal clear on that point--and seeing as how neither Dez nor Ulaz had come up with a better plan for getting Ulaz into the project, Meri had taken matters into her own hands.

It was time to act.

Ulaz closed his eyes, his Quintessence restless in the air between them. Meri had been paying more attention to that lately. She couldn't yet pick out species markers the way Ulaz could, but she was starting to pick up on the little disturbances that indicated concern, even when it didn't show on the surface.

"This is never going to work," Ulaz said. "Haggar keeps a close eye on her inner circle."

"She's not a mind reader, though," Meri pointed out, flashing a cheeky smile to try to hide the flutter in her chest at the thought of lying to Haggar's face.

From the flat look Ulaz gave her, she didn't cover as well as she'd hoped.

"It's different once I'm out there," she said. "I get nervous when I'm prepping for something like this, but once I'm moving, there's no room for fear. Trust me, Ulaz. I'm not a complete rookie."

"That doesn't solve the issue of your Quintessence."

"That's why I'm here, actually." Meri took a deep breath, trying to get her pounding heart under control. This was for the Holts. She could do this much for them. They were counting on her. "You work with Quintessence in this lab. Extracting it. Purifying it."

Ulaz stiffened. "What, exactly, are you suggesting?"

"Well... What would happen if I were to... I don't know, inject myself with Quintessence that has a different signature? Hypothetically."

"You aren't seriously considering this. The side-effects alone--"

"So you have done it before," Meri said, breath escaping her in a rush. "I thought that's what the records were pointing to, but--" She shook her head. "Would it work?"

Ulaz's face remained neutral, but for the first time since Meri had arrived he also drew a veil over his Quintessence, leaving him completely unreadable. "I can't advise it."

"Noted. Would it work? Would it be enough to keep Haggar from pegging me as the wrong species?"

"In theory," Ulaz said, the words strained. "If we found the right Quintessence--pureblooded Galra, maybe--then it might work. But--"

"Would it kill me?"

Ulaz fell silent, seeming to fight against his next words. "Unlikely. Some people have bad reactions, but we'd start with a small dose, and if you don't show any concerning symptoms it shouldn't put your life at risk."

Meri nodded, her knees feeling like jelly. She wasn't sure if she was relieved to know this plan was still viable or horrified as it slowly moved from the realm of the hypothetical into a real possibility. "Can you get me a supply? Enough to last me a few months, at least?"

A stirring of unease slipped past Ulaz's careful blocks, and he took her by the shoulders, his face conflicted. "This won't be pleasant," he warned her. "Even if you don't have a severe reaction, you're still taking in refined Quintessence in a way your body isn't meant to handle."

"I'm Altean, though," she pointed out, dropping her voice low. "We handle other people's Quintessence all the time."

"And that _might_ help you. It might not. When you take on Quintessence, ordinarily, you process it to match your own signature. Injections would deliberately bypass that step. At the very least we're looking at headaches, nausea, maybe chronic fatigue or impaired focus. This is _dangerous_."

"Everything we do is dangerous." Meri squared her shoulders, trying to look like she knew what she was doing. "We're running out of time and you know it. Now can you get me the Quintessence or not?"

Ulaz pinched the bridge of his nose, his Quintessence roiling again for a long moment before it quieted. "Yes," he said. "I'll get it to you by the end of the movement. Promise me you'll wait at least another movement before you go. Just to be sure your symptoms won't be too much to handle."

Meri sagged with relief, clapping Ulaz on the shoulder. "One movement," she promised. "Thank you."

* * *

"She's leaving?" Karen asked. "Just like that?"

"Just like that." Coran turned away from the screen, eyeing her. "I would have expected you to be relieved, considering how concerned you've been with her around."

Karen snapped her mouth shut, looking up from the email Keena had sent her, thanking her for her hospitality and expressing a desire to meet up if Karen ever made it back to New Altea. Coran had already turned back to his work, but she got the impression he was still watching her. Or sensing her, maybe. She'd been trying to downplay her concerns about Keena's trustworthiness.

She should have realized Coran would see through her.

"I am a little relieved, I guess," Karen said. "One less thing to worry about. But she wouldn't just leave for no reason." She sighed, leaning back in her seat. She'd only just decided to accept Ryner's help with surveillance, too. So much for that plan. "I just wish we could keep an eye on her."

"I feel you there," Coran admitted. "Thace and I have been talking about her."

Karen cocked her head to the side, something tickling at her mind the way Green did sometimes when there was something Karen ought to have known. It had been a near constant over the last week or so, and it gnawed at Karen like a name that was stuck on the tip of her tongue, but that she couldn't quite remember.

She'd been doing fairly well at ignoring the sensation as it started to fade, but it came roaring back now. Something to do with Keena? She'd toyed with the idea on and off the last few days--sometimes she thought it was Keena's plan that was bothering her, sometimes Sam's fate, sometimes something to do with the Green Lion robeast Pidge had fought.

Whatever it was, it made her stomach turn.

"Oh?" she asked. "What does Thace have to say about her?"

Coran hesitated. "I'm... not sure I should say. It's not my place to tell."

"Well, if it has to do with the safety of the people on this ship, I think Keena's privacy can take a back seat for once."

His lips twitched, but he shook his head. "It's not Keena's privacy I'm worried about. It's Keith's."

"Keith's?" Karen's heart contracted. "How is he wrapped up in this? Coran? If that woman's put her son in danger somehow-- She has, hasn't she? That _bitch_."

Arching an eyebrow, Coran held up his hands. "I haven't said anything, Karen."

"It's true, isn't it?" Karen stood, restlessness settling into her bones. "I can't put my finger on exactly what she's hiding, but I don't like it. And it does have something to do with Keith--I don't even need you to tell me that much. Matt and Keith have both been upset with her for a long time now." Her thoughts were spiraling now, and she rounded on Coran. "Tell me the truth. Is Keith in danger because of his mother?"

"Not directly? At least not yet. Keith isn't letting her push him around, and Thace is doing what he can to keep her from meddling, too."

Karen narrowed her eyes. "But she has a plan? One that involves Keith?"

"Yes." Coran shook his head. "I can't tell you more than that. Not when Thace told me in confidence, and Keith didn't want to tell anyone at all. I'm sorry, Karen, but as of right now the situation is under control. Keena can't touch them as long as they're on the homeworld, and we couldn't stop her anyway."

Karen's first instinct was to fight Coran on this, to demand answers. But she understood where he was coming from. Keith had had precious few people he could trust in his life, and if he found out the team was gossiping about him behind his back, things could get ugly fast. Karen didn't like it, but if Coran said Keith wasn't in any danger, she wouldn't push it. For now.

She sure as hell wasn't going to forget about it, though, and she was doubly pissed now that Keena had slipped away before Ryner had a chance to scatter her spores. Karen would have liked very much to hear some of the things that went on behind closed doors.

"Fine," she said, returning to her station and dropping into the chair. "Just promise me you'll let me know if anything ever changes? I'd never forgive myself if anything happened to Keith."

Coran smiled at her, the affection plain on his face. "Believe me, you're not the only one. His father may have been a bastard, and his mother's not much better, but he's found himself a good family out here. And none of us is going to let Keena hurt him."

* * *

Rolo's memory of the last two days was patchy at best. He remembered being taken from the cell, Sam fighting back against the guards and getting himself beaten bloody as a result. He remembered the fear--more for Sam's sake than his own, though he couldn't deny that he was terrified of what the next step in the druids' plan might be. Robeasts. They'd figured that much out. But somehow when he'd imagined that, Rolo had imagined that it would be the end. That once they were taken to be made into robeasts, there would be no coming back.

The fact that Sam wasn't dead yet somehow made it all the worse.

Rolo remembered being taken to a new room, farther out than the lab they'd destroyed. There was a coffin-like box in the center of the room, and Rolo had fought when they tried to put him in it, but he still could barely put weight on his new prosthetic, and that meant he was off balance and had no leverage to break free.

They placed him in, and Rolo immediately tried to pull out of himself, to watch what they were doing so he could at least have that much information. Instead, he found himself blocked by another presence. A sentinel, of sorts. It watched him from a distance, quiet and wary. It didn't feel actively malicious, but he got the sense that it was waiting for him to make a wrong move, and once he did, it would strike.

That was where the memories started to blur together, a swirl of pain, darkness, the Sentinel. Occasional flashes of clarity as he stood over himself, watching as they drew his Quintessence out and ran it through some device.

The Sentinel was closer, then, than it had ever been, but it was distracted. Maybe that was why Rolo was able to see.

They were bonding him to it. Sam had mentioned something like that, a sentience that lived in the robeast shell he'd found. Something Other that tried to consume him. (The sentinel didn't seem that aggressive, but Rolo could sense its power even at a distance. If it came down to a battle of wills, Rolo doubted he would emerge victorious.)

After that, more darkness. A few images of the lab, of machinery, of scans. Once, Rolo opened his eyes to a hangar bay, staggering in scale and flooded with light. There was a shell on the floor, splayed out, cut open, half machinery, half flesh. The head lolled to one side, empty eyes staring out of a face half-painted blue. Crimson light sparked at the center of those eyes, and Rolo lost himself again.

When they finally pulled him out, it took too long for his mind to settle back into his body. He staggered, forgetting his prosthetic, and the guards had to drag him down the hallway for a time before he regained control of his limbs. He still couldn't walk quickly or without pain after that, but he hobbled along, letting the guards pull him. His mind felt disconnected from his body, and the back of his neck itched like the sentinel was there, just out of sight. Watching him. Waiting.

They took him back to the cell, and Rolo collapsed just inside the door, overwhelmed with relief. He hated how this cell had become a safe haven to him, bare and cold as it was, but it was better than the rest of the base, and Sam--

Sam.

Rolo's heart skipped a beat as he remembered Sam's frenzy of--how long had it been? Two days? Rolo thought it had been two days, but he didn't know why he felt so sure of that count. He looked up, afraid to find Sam frenzied still, afraid to find him broken, afraid to find him hollow.

He was bruised, and he winced as he sat up, but his eyes were steady and focused, though they welled with tears as his gaze locked with Rolo's. Rax must have been at work on him, or else it had been far longer than the two days Rolo assumed, because although bruises poked out of Sam's prison uniform wherever Rolo saw bare skin, most of them were old and yellowed, and the swelling of his lip and around his eye was barely noticeable.

"Sam," Rolo whispered, dragging himself forward.

Sam met him halfway, pulling him into a hug that crushed the breath from Rolo's lungs. "You're okay, son," Sam whispered. "I've got you."

This was the safety. This was the relief that Rolo associated with this cell. The haven from the horrors of the lab, the warmth in the most frigid of nights. The home they'd carved out in spite of all the pain. Rolo sagged against Sam, too weary and too much in pain to hold himself upright. Sam was here. Sam was okay. Next to that, anything else was easily endured.

"What happened?" Rolo asked. "When they took you. Are you okay?"

Sam shushed him, rocking him gently. "I'm fine, son. A few bruises is all. Rax almost has me patched up already, and it's not like I haven't had worse before."

Rolo frowned at him, then turned to Rax, who blinked, then smiled.

"A few bruised ribs was the worst of it. He is not wrong about that. It could have been much worse, had they truly wished to injure him."

Sam huffed a laugh, and Rolo's heart sank. None of them had to say it, but they all knew what they were thinking. As long as the druids needed them to power the robeasts, they probably wouldn't risk them getting too badly hurt. It was a comforting thought, but also a chilling one.

"What about you?" Sam asked, combing back Rolo's hair. "What did they do to you? Did they...?"

"Took me to a new room. Some place I'd never seen, anyway. I think they bonded me to the robeast I'm supposed to pilot?" Rolo shivered. "I was in and out of consciousness for a lot of it. I don't even know how long I was gone."

"Two days," Sam said.

Rolo's mouth ran dry. So he'd been right. Maybe he'd heard the druids talking, or he'd seen a clock a few times while he was under. "Why? What did they do to you?"

Sam was quiet for a long time, long enough for Rolo's back to start to ache from their awkward position and for the two of them to relocate to the corner, where a few dirty blankets made something like a bed.

"They launched my robeast," Sam said. "It's... I'm not sure how to describe it. I was aware of myself, but also not. I wasn't in control, but I wasn't fighting, either." He paused. "At least until I saw Pidge."

Rolo's breath caught in his throat, and he reached out as Sam crumpled.

"They made me fight them," he whispered. "I couldn't--I tried to fight back, but it was like someone else was in control, and they locked me out. I managed to reach out to Pidge's lion, just for a second. I tried to talk to them, but I--I don't know if they heard me." He swallowed, curling in on himself as the dams broke. "I hurt them. I didn't want to, but I hurt them."

Rolo wrapped his arms around Sam and held on tight, his own eyes burning as he caught Rax's gaze over Sam's bowed back. "Fuck them," Rolo whispered, vehemently. "They can't have planned for everything. We'll find a weakness, and we'll stop them. They can't make us fight our own family. They _can't._ "

There had to be something they could do.

* * *

The first four days on Quintessence injections were brutal.

Meri tried to muscle through it, but Ulaz hadn't been kidding about the side effects. It started with queasiness following the injection--which, thankfully, wasn't an injection in the sense of needles and syringes. A person's Quintessence network was a little more nebulous than that, and Ulaz had sent along a device that would release the Galra Quintessence gradually throughout the day, to avoid apparent fluctuations in her species.

It was nice, except that it meant that she was just always a little bit nauseous. Being nauseous meant she didn't want to eat, but she quickly discovered that not eating meant she tired out faster (and she already was dragging by the middle of the afternoon.) And when she got tired, she got headaches. Sometimes minor little aches, sometimes splitting migraines.

At least the brain fog only lasted for a day and a half. She'd been worried when, the morning after starting the Quintessence injections, she woke up unable to make herself remember a single word of Galran. Panicked, she'd locked herself in her room for the rest of the day, thoughts starting at how screwed the plan was and crashing right on down to a desperate need to get out of here before someone caught her. Losing hold of her shift three times that day didn't make her feel any better.

But she was through the worst of it now. Partially an adjustment period, partially a matter of dosage--Ulaz had had her dial back the rate a little, and that helped, though she was just going to have to deal with a certain amount of misery. While Altean blood wasn't uncommon among druids, very few of them had strongly Altean Quintessence signatures, and Meri wanted to stay well clear of that line.

In any case, Dez had helped Meri cover for her absence with a story about a random inspection, and after the first few days. the fluctuations in her Quintessence started to calm. They weren't gone, and Ulaz warned her they weren't likely to disappear until she stopped taking Quintessence--her body quite simply wasn't designed to process someone else's Quintessence. It was like a dam, he told her. Her Quintessence could flow through the open channels, and most of the Galran Quintessence would do the same, but some of it would get stuck, like debris blocking the flow. That led to a build-up of Quintessence, which in the short term led to fatigue as her body ran low on Quintessence, and in the long term led to sudden surges when the blockage cleared.

The surges were the dangerous part. That was where she lost control of her shifts, where the worst of the migraines kicked in, where anyone around who was sensitive to Quintessence would notice something off about her.

But she could tell when one was coming, so she ought to be able to get away from prying eyes. And they were coming less frequently. Three times in the first day, only once the second, then not at all for three days after that. She was adapting. If she'd had unlimited time, she could have simply waited until the surges stopped altogether.

She didn't have unlimited time. Sam Holt was out there, suffering, and Meri held the key to Vindication.

She waited a week, as per Ulaz's instructions, and then she said her goodbyes: a coded message for Ulaz, informing him that she'd begun the operation and she hoped to have his spot in Vindication secured soon; and a brief stop in Dez's office.

"I can't talk you out of this, can I?" Dez asked.

Meri gave a sad smile. "I've left enough people to die because I let my life matter more than theirs."

Dez scowled. "That's not--"

"Don't." Meri held up a hand, her chest tight. "I don't want to argue about this. The fact is, people are suffering, and it's my job to help them. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm not going to let anyone else lose their family as long as I have a chance to stop it."

Dez's face crumpled, but she held her tongue, for which Meri was grateful. She knew exactly how risky this was, and how low her odds of making it back alive. She would try--goddamn would she try to make it home. She didn't want to leave Allura and Coran to grieve again. But she knew them well enough to know they'd understand. Pidge and Matt hadn't lost anyone yet. Not for good. They'd seen death, and they knew the cost of war, but their family was still intact. If Meri could bring Sam home, no matter the cost to herself, she had to do it. Allura and Coran would have done the same.

She hugged Dez, holding on just a moment too long, and squeezed her eyes against a sudden flood of tears. "I won't be able to risk as many messages once I'm in. So... if I send you something for the castle, will you pass it along?"

"Of course."

Meri pulled back, hesitated, then handed Dez a data chip. "In case I die," she said. "So I can at least say goodbye."

She didn't wait for Dez to respond, just turned and hurried out of the office. She moved on autopilot as she navigated familiar corridors and found her way down to her personal shuttle. It was fairly standard-issue; not fancy enough to mark her as someone important. So it should work for her new cover story, once she rewrote the ID codes.

The flight was short and silent, and Meri's new shift wiped away any lingering traces of tears. She'd modeled herself after Ulaz to try to get the right blend of Galra and Altean features-- smooth, light purple skin with a strong jaw and sharp cheekbones. Her own ears, altered only in color, but Galra eyes and sharpened claws. She concealed her _glaes_ and replaced them with new markings, bolder and starkly violet. She lengthened her hair, bleaching it to white, leaving it straight and fine, and pulled it back in a braid to keep it out of her way.

The last step was to double check her ship's ID, as well as her own credentials. She was Reza ve Orahk, a druid with little formal training but considerable potential and an even bigger ego, who'd been stationed on a minor outpost overseeing foodpaste production.

She'd debated for some time how best to approach Haggar's inner circle. The safest options all involved a long con: establishing herself, indicating interest and potential, and letting Haggar extend the invitation herself. But as with everything in this war, Meri simply didn't have time. Every day she wasted was another day in which Sam Holt might die.

Well. If there was one thing she'd learned spying on the Galra Empire, it was that Zarkon fostered boldness. Rewarded it, even. Meri had no clue if Haggar felt the same, but an arrogant druid who felt entitled to the best posting in the universe certainly wouldn't be unheard of. Meri just had to prove that she was as good as she was pretending to be.

Then it was time. Meri came out of the last jump, her shift set, her credentials in place. She'd changed out of her standard uniform and jettisoned it, donning instead a set of druids' robes. When Haggar's flagship came into view, Meri's pulse thundered in her ear.

Then an alert sounded, indicating that the control tower had registered her presence. Meri threw herself into the role of Reza, sending out authorization codes by rote and requesting clearance to land in the main hangar. She didn't wait for the tower to respond, just headed in and smiled to herself as the doors slid open to admit her.

There was a contingent of sentries waiting for her when she descended the ramp, an officer at their head looking none too pleased. "What is the meaning of this? You don't have clearance to land. Who are you?"

Meri strode past him, mimicking the stride of a woman who knew herself to be above these ordinary soldiers. The officer spluttered, striding after her.

"Stop! Answer my questions or--"

"Or what?" Meri asked, letting a sneer slip into her voice. She wore the blank mask all druids wore, so the officer wouldn't be able to see, but he stopped nonetheless, falling silent in the face of her disdain. "You're going to arrest a druid? I'd like to see you try."

"And I'd like to see you stand up to the Lady Haggar."

Meri smiled wider, turning fully toward him. "I'd like that very much, actually. Why don't you be a dear and call her down here? I have a proposition I think she'll want to hear."

* * *

It was a long flight back to the homeworld, and an even longer ride from the cave where they left Red back to the 301. Keith was tense the whole time, a growing sense of dread adding to the awkwardness that already filled the air between him and Arel. Arel, for his part, kept quiet. Maybe he still hated Keith as much as he claimed to, but maybe the silence was his way of not picking a fight.

Either way, Keith didn't mind. Better awkward silence than trying to talk with someone who would probably never see eye to eye with him. (Lance wasn't so comfortable with the silence, Keith knew, and he kept trying to fill it with chatter that fell flat with no one there to pick up the conversation.)

They were back, though, and no one had murdered anyone. All they had to do now was get through a quick check-in with Mirek and then they could part ways. Keith wasn't so optimistic as to hope he'd never have to work with Arel again, but he thought it might at least be civil, when they had a job to focus on and weren't jammed together into a tiny little shuttle for a three-hour flight through a featureless wasteland.

Lance yawned as they parked their speeder--a nondescript city model, not the one they'd brought from Red, which they'd hid on the edge of town. "Jeez Louise," Lance said. "How am I tired already?"

"It's because you've been sitting down for so long," Thace said dryly. "Walking ought to wake you up a little."

Lance pulled a face, but he walked without any further prodding, even bouncing a little between steps as though to get the blood flowing. At first he tried to spark a new conversation, this time on the topic of what was going to get Keith to go to Oriande with Nyma, Akira, and Matt--who seemed perfectly content to close the door on Oriande for good.

"I mean.... Whatever it is, it's got to be bad, right?" Lance asked. He seemed oblivious to Arel's perplexed look, and Keith almost had to wonder if Lance had forgotten Arel was there. Or that only Keith and Lance himself knew what had happened on Oriande.

Keith and Lance and maybe Thace. Keith had never been good at reading him, but he didn't seem as lost as Arel, which probably meant Coran had said something. Keith suspected Coran and Thace told each other far more than they let on.

Lance crossed his arms, looking disgruntled. "Shiro's the obvious answer, but we already know that it doesn't have anything to do with him--Don't get me wrong!" he added, fluttering his hands like he'd only just realized what he'd said. "I'm glad Shiro's okay in the future. I don't want you to have to go to Oriande to try to save him. I just can't figure out what the heck would get the four of you to go back. It's gotta be something bad, but it's also like... why Nyma? You, Matt, and Akira are one thing. If it was just the three of you I'd say maybe it has something to do with Red. Or, not with Red, but like you all went on a mission together and _that's_ why? But that doesn't explain why Nyma would be with you."

Keith had stopped listening. A growing sense of dread that been plaguing him ever since the conversation had turned toward Oriande, and now it reared up again, closing around Keith's throat. What if it was Red? He'd had the thought before, and he kept trying to shut it away. What if the thing she wasn't ready to talk about was what took them to Oriande at some point in the near future?

Lance trailed off, then reached out and placed a hand on Keith's shoulder. "Sorry," he said. "I'm sure it's going to be fine."

He couldn't possibly know that, but they were almost to the warehouse that served as the rebellion's primary point of contact. Keith picked up the pace, eager to find Mirek and dive back into rebellion work. With luck, there would be a job coming up soon that Keith could throw himself into so he didn't have to think about Oriande or about the secrets Red was keeping.

Keith was the first through the warehouse door, and he stopped almost immediately, the fur on the back of his neck standing on end. The warehouse was dark and silent, and his footsteps echoed oddly. He summoned his bayard as Arel followed him inside, and as his eyes adjusted, he felt his heart sink.

The warehouse had been gutted. Crates of supplies and weapons stores were missing, machinery had been ripped out, sometimes leaving snapped power cords behind. A single holographic projector remained, smashed on the floor. Most of the furniture had been left behind--tables, chairs, and desks--but otherwise no signs remained that anyone had been here recently.

" _Vrekt_ ," Keith hissed.

Lance shoved his way in, past Arel, who remained frozen in the doorway. "What happened?"

"What does it look like?" Arel's shock had given way to fury, and Keith didn't miss the cold glare sent his way. "Someone sold us out, and Mirek had to clear the area before they got caught."

Lance went rigid, his expression darkening. "I hope you're not insinuating anything about one of the people in this room."

Arel let out a short, hissed breath, his hands balling into fists. Then, abruptly, he backed off. "I'm not insinuating anything. We should go."

They turned, but the scrape of a boot on concrete froze Keith in his tracks, and he whirled, wishing he hadn't left his paladin armor in Red. He'd have appreciated its light just about now.

As though in answer to his thoughts, the overhead lights turned on, washing the hangar in light, and Keith squinted against the sudden glare. He tensed as he caught sight of Imperials solders at the edges of the room, stepping out from behind upturned tables and through dark doorways. _Vrekt._ They'd obviously missed Mirek and the rebels with her in their first raid, but it seemed they'd decided to set up an ambush, just in case it caught any stragglers.

Sure enough, more soliders closed in behind them, blocking the way out.

"Well, how do you like that? We've caught some traitors, after all."

The voice tickled something in the back of Keith's mind, and he turned, heart hammering as he tried to place the Galra before him. He was tall and lanky, surprisingly young for the Lieutenant's insignia emblazoned on his breastplate, and he grinned when he met Keith's eye.

"Keith drul Vorsek," he said. "I'd heard rumors you were here, but I have to admit, I didn't really believe them. I figured you'd be off hiding your shame."

Beside Keith, Arel stiffened and seemed to stop breathing. "Vit."

Oh.

It suddenly clicked--where Keith knew the officer from. Vit drul Verit, Arel's twin brother and one of the most vicious, ruthless people in their training group. Arel had gotten kicked out because of his refusal to fight his brother, but Vit had never had the same qualms. Keith remembered once, early on, when the twins had been pitted against each other in a fight. Arel had spent the entire match running away, and Vit had almost severed his hand.

And now he was here.

"Hello, brother _dearest_ ," Vit said, his lip curling back to show his teeth. "I'd love to catch up, but I'm here on business." He drew the hilt of an energy weapon, which sprang to life with the press of a button, becoming a long, crackling violet spear. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to kill you now."


	32. One Step Forward...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time.... Val, Ryner, and the Holts started digging into the books Val got from Oriande in search of aspects of Quintessence theory that might help them get Sam, Rolo, and Rax back. Keena has been acting shifty. Ryner offered to help Karen spy on her, and Thace blocked her attempts to corner Keith. Then Keena left for New Altea, and Karen and Coran had a conversation about her intentions.
> 
> Having heard about Sam's transfer to Vindication, Meri pushed forward her plan to infiltrate Haggar's inner circle. She got Ulaz to supply her with Galra Quintessence injections to mask her Quintessence signature. The side-effects are terrible--nausea, headaches, fatigue, and occasional problems control Quintessence--but she rode out the worst of it before setting a course for the heard of the Empire under the alias Reza ve Orahk.
> 
> Keith, Lance, Thace, and Arel returned to the homeworld, tensions between Keith and Arel somewhat eased after Arel's time on the castle-ship. When they went to make contact with the rebellion, however, they found the place deserted and Arel's twin brother Vit lying in wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your patience, folks. If you're on the discord, you already saw that I had some troubles with this chapter and ended up cutting about 4k at the last minute and scrambling to rewrite the entire sequence. Thankfully we're now back on track, so hopefully there won't be any delays with the upcoming chapters.
> 
> Trigger warnings for this chapter: death of unnamed characters, all off-screen but discussed throughout. Major character injury.

Vit wasted no time. He raised his hand to signal the rest of his squad to open fire, then hefted his spear and charged. Keith was left scrambling for cover, his head still spinning with the fact that Vit was here--Vit, who had always been at the top of their class, despite being one of the less physically imposing people there. Keith and Vit had been paired up for a number of training exercises, and they vacillated wildly between an uneasy cooperation and vitriolic conflicts over the best approach to the challenge.

Keith hadn't seen him since the Proof, though he'd heard that Vit had made a name for himself among Prorok's crew. Unlike Keith, Vit wasn't a legacy officer, and his parents didn't have a ship of their own, so he'd had to forge his own path--and by all accounts, that was exactly what he'd done. Making Lieutenant before age twenty was no small accomplishment. It was a testament to just how ruthless he could be.

Vit had a dozen sentries with him, along with three other officers. The sentries laid down cover fire as Vit and his officers charged in--Vit headed straight for Arel, his face twisted with rage.

Keith had only a moment to worry about Arel's safety before his opponent was on him--a burly Galra woman who carried a massive two-handed sword--solid metal, rather than the usual energy blade. Keith didn't want to downplay the threat, because even a single hit from that sword could put him out of the fight for good, but her swings were slow and cumbersome, and Keith had a lifetime's worth of practice dodging around bigger, stronger opponents.

Frankly, he was more worried about the sentries. If one of them got in a lucky shot, it could be a disaster. It didn't even have to be a direct hit; anything that slowed him might give the burly officer the opening she needed.

Keith backed toward Lance, who was dealing with a quicker, nimbler officer who kept darting in, making it hard for Lance to aim his rifle. Lance kept having to yield ground just to give himself enough room to aim.

"If I buy you some time, think you can take out some of the sentries?" Keith hissed.

Lance scoffed. "Can I-- What kind of question is that? Can you take out a level two training bot?"

Keith grinned, taking that as an affirmative, and spun on the ball of his foot to charge toward Lance's opponent. The burly officer came lumbering after him, but she was so loud he barely had to watch her. He just waited for her footsteps to get close, then darted around to the other side of the nimble officer to use him as a shield. All the while, Lance kept up a steady rhythm of shots. Keith would bet good money that he was taking out each sentry in one hit, too.

"I don't want to fight you, Vit!" Arel cried, backing away from his brother. He had a shield out to fend off Vit's relentless attacks, but Arel carried no weapon. It wasn't unusual, for the higher ranked members of the resistance. Some of them acknowledged the danger they faced and compromised by carrying a compact pistol for self-defense, but Arel wasn't one of them.

Vrekt. He was going to get himself killed, wasn't he?

"That's your problem," Vit snarled. He brought his spear down, swatting aside the chair Arel shoved between them. "You never wanted to fight. Too much of a coward to finish basic training. You didn't even care how that would affect the rest of us, did you?"

"I never asked to be part of this family."

"Didn't stop you from accepting Father's help when he got you shipped here instead of one of the labor colonies."

Keith's fight had carried him to the front corner of the room, where a bank of computers had once stood. He kicked the nimble officer away, giving himself a second to take stock of the situation. It would be too easy to get hemmed in here, and if he lost his mobility the brawny officer was going to take his head off. That was probably the only reason she'd followed him, instead of going for Lance.

Well, he couldn't stay here. He needed more room to maneuver, which meant he was going to have to make a break for it and try to lure his opponents back out into the center of the room.

He parried an attack from the nimble officer, but rather than pressing the advantage, he sprang back, then turned, ducked under a swing from the brawny officer, and ran. He made it only a few steps before the nimble officer pounced on him, knocking him to the ground, They slid a few feet before coming to a stop, the officer atop Keith with a knee on his back. He raised his sword. Keith thrashed, trying to unseat the officer, or at least turn himself over so he could block the attack, but it was useless. He had no leverage, and no time to think of another way out.

A laser singed the air just above Keith's head, burning a hole through the officer's shoulder. A second laser followed, striking him in the chest, and the man wavered.

Keith twisted, bucking him off, and the next shot took him between the eyes, dropping him as Lance approached.

"Thanks," Keith said, breathless.

Lance looked him over briefly, then flashed a grin. "Bet you feel pretty dumb now for doubting my abilities."

"I never--"

The brawny officer roared a challenge as she descended on Keith and Lance, putting an end to Lance's bravado. She wasn't nearly so threatening without the sentries or the other officer to back her up, but her armor was nothing to scoff at, and no matter how many times Keith darted in to slash at her, no matter how many shots Lance got in while her back was turned, nothing fazed her.

Keith backed off, glancing around for ideas as he struggled to catch his breath. Thace was still busy dealing with the third officer on the other side of the room; they seemed evenly matched, both quick and tough. Thace was bleeding from a wound on his arm, but his opponent was clutching his side--though he didn't seem much impaired by the wound. And--

_Vrekt._

Vit had Arel backed into the corner, his spearhead sparking each time it connected with Arel's shield.

"Lance!" Keith cried. "Get ready to go!"

"What--?"

Keith didn't stay to explain. He took off at a sprint, watching the fluid motion of Vit's spear. It was like a dance, the spear cutting broad strokes through the air around him and burning violet afterimages into Keith's vision. He stopped just out of Vit's range, waited a split second for the spear to swing back around, and then struck, his blade catching the shaft and throwing Vit off balance. Keith almost managed to rip the weapon out of Vit's hands, but Vit held on, snarling as he came face to face with Keith.

"Well isn't that adorable," he snarled, spinning into an attack that left Keith reeling, the force of the blow radiating up his arms. "One traitor protecting another."

He punctuated his words with two more strikes in quick succession, and Keith grunted as he parried, backing away.

"Arel," Keith growled, sparing a brief glance for Arel, whose eyes were wide with fear. "Get to safety."

Vit's lips pulled back into a snarl, and he turned to block Arel's escape. Keith was faster, launching a flurry of strikes that forced Vit onto the defensive as Arel made a break for the door, where Lance was waiting, keeping up a steady stream of fire at the brawny officer. Thace seemed to have put his opponent down at last, and between him and Lance, the remaining woman was flagging fast.

Keith caught Lance's eyes, and Lance nodded, grabbing Arel by the arm and running, calling to Thace to catch up.

"No!" Vit roared. He stopped, catching Keith's sword on his gauntlet and driving the tip of his spear into the ground. Lightning raced outward from the spearhead, spiderwebbing across Keith's body, and he screamed as he momentarily lost control of his muscles.

When his vision cleared, Vit was sprinting for the door, his last officer already gone. Keith threw himself after Vit, fighting down the pain to push himself faster.

He caught up on the street outside and swung for Vit's back, his sword leaving a long, thin gash across the crimson armor. He didn't draw blood, though he did recapture Vit's attention, and he danced back as Vit rounded on him, spinning through a series of attacks too fast for Keith to keep up.

He wasn't going to win this fight. Not alone and unprepared, with his body already screaming from being electrocuted. Another attack like that and he was done for--and Vit was an accomplished duelist in his own right. This fight would have been difficult even on the best of terms.

But Keith didn't need to win. He just needed to stall long enough for Lance to get Arel to safety and pray that between the two of them, Lance and Thace could deal with the last officer.

He pressed forward for a minute, then danced back to avoid another pulse of electricity as Vit grew desperate. Thirty seconds more, and Keith could feel himself growing sloppy. He prayed he'd bought enough time, then turned and ran, twisting through the streets of the 301. Vit was a powerful warrior, at least an equal match for Keith in a fight, but he was slower, and he didn't know this city like Keith did. Within a few turns, Keith had lost sight of Vit, and a few more after that, he couldn't even hear the sounds of his pursuit.

He found a quiet alley in which to hide, and to wait, but the streets around him remained still. Either he'd lost Vit, or Vit had decided to wait for backup. Either way, Keith didn't want to risk his luck by sticking around. He cut through the lock on a nearby door--a back exit for a residential building, from the looks of it--and ducked inside. He'd keep off the streets as much as he could until he reached the neighboring district, then try to get in touch with the others.

Until then, he just had to trust that they'd be able to take care of themselves.

* * *

"Have you seen Akira?" Shiro asked, poking his head into the bridge, where Coran and Zelka were conferring about the castle's defenses. They both looked up at Shiro's question, and Coran called up a new window on his display screen.

"He was making a run on the Zhek Chain blockade last I heard," Coran said slowly, scrolling the screen down. "Ah! Looks like they were clearing out the rabble last night. Should be calling for a wormhole any time now, if you want to meet them in the Guard hangars."

Shiro raised a hand in thanks, then turned and headed out. He couldn't decide how to feel about the news. With Keith and Lance on the Galra homeworld and Pidge still recovering from their ankle injury, the Guard had had to pick up the slack, running more missions than ever. Recruitment had increased since the release of Eli's last video, putting the Guard near a thousand members, though several hundred of those were still in basic training. The increased personnel meant that the Guard could handle more than ever before, but the new demands on the training officers, Lieutenant Layeni in particular, meant that Akira was needed in the field almost every day.

A small, traitorous part of Shiro had been hoping that today was one of those days. He wasn't ready for this conversation.

The Black Lion's displeasure tickled the back of his mind, and Shiro picked up the pace. _I'm not backing out,_ he thought in her direction. _I said I'd talk to him, and that's what I'm going to do._

He'd just hoped he could put it off a little longer.

The last few weeks had been good for him--having Matt and Allura back, keeping up with his regular sessions with Black. Allura joined them sometimes, and talking to her about his past had been good practice.

Good enough that Black had begun to nudge him toward talking with someone outside their bond. It was as much Shiro's idea as hers--she wouldn't have pushed if he really wasn't ready, and he knew that. He wanted the past to have less of a hold on him, and until Coran found a therapist, Shiro had to find his own ways to cope. As long as the past was a shadow hanging over him, it could stretch as far as it wanted to, but in talking with Black and with Allura, he'd brought it into the light. He'd given shape to his trauma, and that shape was smaller than it had once seemed.

Now he only needed for it not to be a chasm that separated him from his friends.

Black had proposed a number of people Shiro could talk to. Keith and Matt already understood a lot of what he would have said; Lance and Coran had proven to be excellent listeners who diffused some of Shiro's tension with their easy-going natures.

Ultimately, though, Shiro knew it had to be Akira. Before the Arena, there had never been anything that Shiro felt he couldn't tell his brother. He suspected Akira had even known about Matt before Shiro admitted to it. They hadn't talked about it, not directly--after all, it wasn't Shiro's secret alone, and he didn't want to put either his or Matt's career in jeopardy. But Akira had already known about Shiro's feelings for Matt, and they'd talked about training for the Kerberos mission. Akira may have restrained himself to pointed questions and subtle jabs, but it was clear he suspected something had changed. Even so, it had killed Shiro not to pour out everything in the letters he sent home from aboard the _Persephone_.

It killed him now whenever the subject of Shiro's past came up. The furrow of Akira's brow, the way Shiro's words dried up each time he tried to broach the subject. The way Akira recognized this and backed off, offering silent sympathy but refusing to push.

It had gone on long enough. Shiro was ready to talk about it. He was ready to start.

But his heart still pounded as he made his way to Blue Tower on autopilot, following familiar hallways to the main Guard hangar. He told himself he was getting worked up over nothing. He'd been over all this with Black and with Allura before. He'd been over some of it with Matt, and the universe had yet to come crashing down on top of him.

It felt different this time, somehow. The tremor in his hand as he reached for the door controls spoke to higher stakes, and the vice around his chest made the weight of his past seem greater than any of the memories he'd skimmed across in his sessions with Black. He wanted Akira to understand--but he didn't want to have to tell him what had happened.

Chaos waited for Shiro inside the hangar, damaged ships smoking and sparking on the hangar floor, medics in white coats sprinting to help. Through an open hangar door, Shiro could see the castle's barrier spring alive, and a squadron of fighters launched from their bay further down the line. The adrenaline already flooding Shiro's system roared alive as it found a viable outlet at last. He itched to turn and run for Black's hangar, but if there was danger, Coran surely would have sounded an alarm by now. Shiro scanned the crowd of pilots and mechanics and medics scrambling in every direction until he found a uniform marked with the thin white V of an officer.

Shiro glanced at their nameplate as he approached. "Chief Vecta," he called. The officer--a squad leader, if Shiro remembered Guard command structure correctly--turned, clapping hand to chest in salute.

"Sir!"

"Report. What's the situation? Are we under attack?"

"No, sir. Not anymore. The Imperial fleet had one last surprise waiting for us in the Zhek Chain. You heard about the blockade? We broke through the early yesterday morning, and the bulk of the enemy fleet withdrew. We've been clearing out the stragglers ever since. Seemed to be going smoothly, sir, until the witch sent one of her robeasts to get a little payback."

Shiro's mouth ran dry. A robeast. The Guard wasn't equipped to handle something like that. "Did it follow you? I'll scramble the lions--"

"No need, sir," Chief Vecta said. "Commander Shirogane led the counterattack. Not that that thing didn't take its toll, sir, but I saw it go down with my own eyes."

Swallowing a curse, Shiro clasped his hands behind his back. Control. He needed to keep his poise. "What sort of a toll are we talking about here?"

Chief Vecta pressed their lips together, though their gaze remained steady. "I haven't seen the reports, sir."

"Ballpark, then."

"Ten to fifteen percent casualties, sir, as of preliminary counts."

"And A--Commander Shirogane? Where can I find him?"

Chief Vecta finally wavered here, their eyes darting to a knot of commanders helping the medical staff set up a triage along one wall of the hangar. Shiro's mouth ran dry as the silence stretched. Then, finally, Vecta found their voice. "The Commander was injured in the battle. He's already been taken to Medical."

* * *

"This it?" Val asked, tapping through a series of scans of the planet below. "Not a lot of activity."

Nyma hummed, turning Blue into a long, slow arc behind two of the planet's moons. "Right coordinates, though, and the files said the way they ran this place is pretty, uh..."

"Rustic?" Val suggested.

"That's one word for it."

Val grimaced. She'd been afraid of that. Nyma had been the one to suggest Thillon 3JX as their next mission, and she was the one who'd compiled and reviewed most of the intel. Val had skimmed the briefing, but she'd pulled most of her understanding straight out of Nyma's head as they flew.

She felt a little bad about slacking off, but she'd been digging into Quintessence theory almost every chance she got. Her current focus was spatial mapping and targeting of manifestations at range--how she could put herself in a specific location when she bilocated, how someone with telepathic leanings could speak with the person they wanted to and not everyone else in the area. It might not tell her what she should be trying to do, but it ought to give her some idea of what was possible, or at least what she was going to need to do to pick Commander Holt or Rolo or anyone else out from the entire rest of the universe.

"Val," Nyma said. "You're getting distracted again."

Val shook herself, smiling apologetically at Nyma as she brought them back around toward the little pinprick on the surface that was the prison camp.

(It wasn't like Val was the only distractable one in the lion today. Nyma kept getting sucked into Val's theorizing or spiraling down mental rabbit holes of her own.)

"It's... just the one enclosure?" Val guessed.

"Just the one," Nyma confirmed, "and that's where all the security is concentrated. All the security and all the tech. The prisoners are spread all through the valley."

That was it. Val remembered now, through a combination of her own hazy recollection of the intel and vague impressions she'd picked up through the bond. The Thillon colonies were an experimental line of prison setups, meant to be self-sufficient. So-called "dangerous" prisoners were never sent places like this, only people who wouldn't cause trouble. They had no way to leave the planet, no means of communication, and only basic tools, but they were dropped in semi-fertile regions and provided seeds and livestock. The idea was that they'd be so busy just trying to get by that they wouldn't cause any trouble, and the overseer who lived in the central enclosure, rationing supplies, could put out any fires that started among the prisoners.

"Not that I'm complaining," Val said, "because any prison colony is a shitty place to be, but is there any particular reason this place got priority?"

Nyma tensed, and Val frowned at her. She hadn't thought much of this mission--just another routine jailbreak. There were always more of those waiting to happen, and they hit Val hard every time. So, sure, they ran a lot of them. That was where Nyma's strength lay. Other people were good at diplomacy or heavy combat. Nyma was good at breaking in, breaking out, and not being seen.

But maybe there was more to it than that. There was something in Nyma's thoughts that spoke to familiarity, and an old bitterness.

Seeming to catch onto Val's train of thought, Nyma huffed. "I've heard stories about Thillon colonies before, okay? They aren't the worst places in the universe by far--hell of a lot nicer than what some people get living under the Empire's thumb. But it's also a way for the Empire to break up families. I'll bet you anything every person down there is missing a parent, a kid, a sibling... Reports are already coming in from worlds we've freed. I don't know if any of the missing people are down there, but they're easy targets to hit, and there's the potential to reunite a lot of families."

"Aww." Val grinned, leaning over to give Nyma's arm a shove. "You're really sweet when you want to be."

Nyma scowled, pulling away from Val, and glared at the colony visible far below. "You ready for this or what?"

"I'm ready," Val said, straightening her spine. "Let's go."

* * *

"I'm fine," Akira said, straining for calm as J'tess, the Chief Medical Officer for the First through Third Generations, pressed him back down on the exam table. He'd been given a private room in the Guard's medical wing, which he supposed was a perk of being the Guard Commander. As was the priority treatment--which was why Akira was here, with one of the best doctors they had on staff, while his men were down in the hangar dying.

Not that he wasn't grateful for the privacy--his relationship to medical settings being sketchy at best, and not exactly conducive to maintaining the decorum appropriate to his rank--but he would have very much liked it if his warrant officers would listen to him when he said he was fine.

J'tess reached for a scanner, and Akira took the opportunity to roll off the bed, grunting only a little as his side pulled taught. He'd made it out of the battle in one piece, more or less, but his fighter hadn't been so lucky, and by the time he made a graceless landing the hangar, his cockpit had been a hellish maze of fried electronics and red-hot metal. He'd commend the engineers behind the fighters on building something that could take a beating without losing structural integrity, but all that energy had to go somewhere.

It figured, of course, that that was how he'd hurt himself. He'd suffered no worse than a few bumps and bruises from the actual fighting, but the heat of one too many direct hits had seared straight through his Guard armor as he scrambled out through the mangled hatch. His hand throbbed where he'd placed his palm down on the hot metal, and he had a long, ugly burn down his side. The suit there wasn't completely ruined, so he held out hope that it had taken the worst of the damage, but the pain was trying very hard to dash those hopes.

What J'tess didn't seem to understand was that other people had been hurt far worse. There were dead and dying just a few hundred feet away, and more still lying where the robeast had shot them down. Akira should be out there coordinating search and rescue, not lying around here waiting for some painkillers.

"Commander Shirogane!" J'tess snapped, turning back to him with the scanner in hand. She was an Urtcha, a race of alien Akira found vaguely reminiscent of carpenter ants, and the click of her mandibles was intimidating enough to stop him in his tracks. She let out a hiss of air that passed for a sigh among her people. "At least let me finish the examination."

"I'll be fine, Dr. J'tess. I can get some burn cream from the medical supply, then come back to see you in a few hours, once the people who _actually_ need your help have been seen to.

"But--"

Akira held up his hands to silence her. "We both know this castle doesn't have enough cryopods to take everyone who's going to need one. You should be down in triage, helping stabilize the people who just miss the cutoff."

J'tess hesitated, watching him closely. She was a good soldier and an even better doctor, which told him that his burns were probably worse than he was giving them credit for.

That, or Layeni had ordered J'tess to get him out of the hangar in some misguided effort to protect his privacy.

In another situation, Akira might have thanked her. But right now, he couldn't stop thinking about the carnage of the robeast fight. He'd never faced one before--not without the paladins taking the lead. If he'd had any warning about what was coming, he would have called for Takashi and kept the Guard on damage control. But it had come out of nowhere, and there was no time for reinforcements. The creature--small, quick, and hard-hitting--had gone for civilian targets, and Akira had no choice but to throw everything he had at it before the Zhek paid the price. It was over in minutes, large swaths of land and orbital structures decimated, dozens of Guard fighters in pieces all around. Akira itched to get back down to the hangar, to find Layeni and demand an accounting of casualties. Some of the pilots had ejected before their ships tore themselves apart, and perhaps some who had crashed had survived the impact.

Even so, casualties were heavy. He hadn't had much time to survey the damage before being whisked off on a (completely unnecessary) stretcher, but he'd seen injuries ranging from fractured limbs to bloody head wounds to crushing injuries, pilots pinned inside crumpled cockpits after collisions with the robeast or with each other. How many people had been injured, all told? Fifty? A hundred? More?

Maybe he was blowing things out of proportion. With the pain gnawing at his thoughts, it was hard to be rational about anything.

But he was right about his place in triage. Ignore his rank, and he probably wouldn't have seen a doctor for hours. The Guard had only a handful of medics for each Generation, and most of them would be busy now loading the most critical patients into the working cryopods.

Akira made a mental note to redirect some of his engineers to help Coran's crew with the rest of the pods. Most of them had deteriorated over the last ten thousand years, as they were relegated to external towers, which had lost all power after the castle landed on Arus. Aside from the six cryopods in the paladins' med bay at the heart of the castle, only another twenty were in working order, though Blue Tower alone had more than two hundred installed. He'd been so concerned with having the fighters ready for combat, and getting the living quarters back up and running to accommodate the new recruits, that he'd given the cryopods less attention than they deserved.

And now his men were paying for it.

J'tess made another move to herd Akira back to the exam table, but Akira squared his shoulders, pouring all his authority into his glower. "I'm going to the paladins' med bay," he said. "Coran or Shay can administer first aid, and you can call me back for a full examination _after_ you've finished with the rest of the men. That's an order, Doctor."

J'tess's mandibles clicked once in irritation. "Yes, sir," she said.

Akura left before she could change her mind. He constrained himself to a march until he reached the door, but as soon as he was out, he made a break for it, sprinting--well, speed-walking--for the elevators. Even that aggravated his wounds, and he allowed himself a grimace as he pushed the button to call the elevator. So... he was definitely going to the paladins' med bay. (Not that it had ever been in question, of course. But if it had, he'd be revising his decision now.) First, though, he needed to find Layeni. He had to _know_.

The elevator door slid open after far too long a wait, and Akira was already stepping forward before he realized that the elevator wasn't empty, as he'd assumed. He smacked straight into Takashi's chest and rebounded, his breath catching as a fresh stab of pain shot through him.

"Akira! Oh, thank _god_. Someone said you were hurt. I thought--" Takashi grabbed Akira by the shoulders and, before Akira could warn him not to squeeze, crushed Akira to his chest.

Akira would have liked to say he restrained himself to a grunt of pain, but the sound could more accurately be called a whimper, and it made Takashi jerk back like he was the one who'd been burned.

"Are you hurt?" he asked. Akira clenched his jaw, and Takashi scowled. "You are! What are you doing out here? You should be in the infirmary!"

His tone, just a little too sharp to be called concern, grated at Akira's nerves, and he skirted around his brother, angling for the open elevator doors. "I'm fine, Takashi. Minor burns. Other people need the medical staff's attention more than I do."

Takashi followed Akira into the elevator, crossing his arms. "What happened? What burns?"

"Surprise attack," Akira said. "Apparently the Zhek Chain's important enough to warrant a robeast."

"I heard that part. What happened to _you_? Did you get shot?"

Akira hunched his shoulders. "I managed to land, Takashi, give me some credit. The ship took some damage, but I'm fine. Just a little residual heat on the hull."

The elevator doors opened, and Akira wavered for a moment, torn between the corridor back to the hangar and the one that would take him across the bridge to the infirmary. He needed to talk to Layeni--but he needed something for the pain, first. He was no good to anyone if he couldn't think straight. Infirmary it was.

It was a struggle to move without limping (he'd banged his knee on the console, he thought), and even breathing in something approaching a normal rhythm took more of Akira's concentration than he wanted to admit. He was stubborn, though, and Takashi was fully in overprotective brother mode, which only fueled Akira's determination to give nothing away.

"You need to be more careful, Akira," Takashi said, striding along behind Akira. "Robeasts are dangerous. You could have been killed!"

"Really?" Akira asked, pain and irritation pitching his voice high. "Really. I hadn't noticed, Takashi, thanks for that little status update."

Takashi growled. "I just mean, it's dangerous out there, and you're a commander. You should be coordinating from the castle, not leading the charge. Or at least-- At least call for backup! I could have helped!"

Akira's jaw slid to one side, his heels hitting the floor tiles hard enough to jar his aching bones with each step. "There wasn't time for that. And my men need me in the field. In case you hadn't noticed, we aren't exactly swimming in troops. We need every body we can get if we're going to stand up to Zarkon's forces."

"But you're not even a fighter pilot! Akira--"

Akira stopped in his tracks, swallowing a cry of pain as Takashi ran into him from behind. His men were dying, his body on the verge of outright rebellion, and whatever patience he'd had for his brother's over-protectiveness was long since gone. "I'm going to give you one chance to reconsider the words that are about to come out of your mouth," he hissed.

Takashi, to his credit, actually wilted a little at that, though the way he grabbed Akira to turn him around didn't do him any favors. "Sorry," Takashi said. "I didn't mean it like that."

"No?" Akira said, taking a savage sort of pleasure in watching Takashi flinch at his cold tone. "How did you mean it, then? I lost pilots out there today--good pilots, and good friends. And we would have lost more if I hadn't been there to help. So don't tell me I shouldn't be out there, Takashi. Don't even try. You don't have a monopoly on risking your life."

"I just don't want to see you hurt," Takashi said, grabbing Akira by the elbow.

Akira shook him off. "This is war, Takashi. You don't always get what you want."

Takashi opened his mouth to say something, but Akira was out of patience. He started walking again, keeping ahead of his brother, and when he reached the med bay, he shut the door in Takashi's face.

"Akira," Takashi called. "Akira, I'm sorry."

Akira snorted, crossing to the cabinet and rifling around for the painkillers. In reaching for one of the higher shelves, though, his suit pulled against his burns, and a stab of pain lanced through his side. He fell against the counter, breath hissing through his teeth, and fumbled for the comms panel on the wall. He input Shay's frequency first, and when she didn't answer, he called Coran instead. "Hey," Akira said, flashing a pained smile. "Sorry to bother you, but the Guard med team is a little overwhelmed right now. When you get a chance, could you come help me out with some burns?"

Coran's brows pinched. "Of course. I'll be right down."

"There's no rush," Akira said quickly, before Coran could hang up. "It hurts like hell, but I'm not going to die. Just promised J'tess I'd have you check me out. I'll be down here taking it easy until you have a chance to get away."

Coran didn't seem mollified by that at all, but he agreed, and Akira ended the call, retreating to an exam table to lay down. Now that he wasn't moving, his aches caught up to him. He would have been aching after that battle without the burns, and with them even breathing hurt. He screwed his eyes shut, listening for any signs that Takashi was still waiting at the door. Akira hadn't locked it, so there technically wasn't anything keeping him out. Akira wasn't sure what he would have done if Takashi had come in anyway. Shout? Throw things? Or just let Takashi apologize and then pretend nothing had even happened? Fortunately, he didn't have to find out. The door remained closed, and Akira was left alone with the pain.

He should call Layeni. He should get her report.

No, he should let her do her damn job. Just because Akira was down for the count didn't mean he needed to pull Layeni away, too. _Just wait for Coran,_ he told himself. _Once you're patched up, you can go help._ He just needed to be patient.

Too bad patience had never been his strong suit.

* * *

The jailbreak was, if anything, even easier than Nyma had anticipated. There were very few prisoners in the central enclosure where security was concentrated, and comparatively little security outside the enclosure.

It made sense. Thillon colonies were meant to be grueling, sparse surroundings for the prisoners who lived there, but no one expected the Imperial overseers to live that sort of life. No, they got the luxury resorts full of every imaginable modern convenience (and even a few frivolous amenities, just as a way to make up for being stationed so far away from the rest of the Empire.) There was a detention center where the troublemakers were held under close watch, and Nyma wouldn't be surprised if at least a few of the overseers hired on prisoners as a little added indulgence.

And considering how unforgiving life outside the central enclosure was meant to be, Nyma couldn't say she blamed the prisoners who jumped at offers like those. Given the right circumstances, Nyma may well have done the same.

Not that it mattered now. Nyma and Val were here to take out off-world communications first, sentry control towers second, and then the rest of the Imperial staff. Once that was done, all that remained would be the slow but relatively safe process of reaching out to the prisoners scattered throughout the valley and getting them back to the castle-ship to be relocated to their homeworlds or to one of several sanctuary worlds that had opened their airspace to refugees.

Nyma had done enough infiltration by now to take the edge off. Her hands remained steady as she made her way through the base, alert for guards or other staff who might sound an alarm. Val was more than a little flighty beside her, but she trusted Nyma enough not to panic--and once they got to the comms tower and Nyma set to work sabotaging the equipment, she gained a new appreciation for having a partner who could be in two places at once.

"Anything yet?" Nyma asked, finishing up with the main antenna and moving on to the secondary array. They'd already uploaded one of Pidge's viruses, which should lock everyone out of the system, but Nyma was a fan of insurance. Better to sabotage the system physically in addition to the cyber attack, just in case they had another way to connect to the comms system that the virus couldn't touch.

Val positioned herself behind Nyma's shoulders, shining a light on the underside of the secondary antenna array so Nyma could work with the full use of both hands. "I've already told you I can't keep track of both bodies at once," she said with a teasing smile. "If I suddenly go a little hazy, it means I've snapped back and it's hitting me hard enough that I can't immediately form a coherent thought. Otherwise I'll tell you what I know when I know it."

Nyma gave her a long-suffering look, then went back to her work. She'd never had Rolo's knack for building, but she knew enough about breaking things to do it without a second thought, which was good because she had enough to wrap her head around with the bilocation.

It was one thing to sit next to her girlfriend while knowing, intellectually, that she was really half a universe away. That, she could accept, sort of. Maybe because things were always weird with the lions.

The part she couldn't get over was how, if she just opened the door and poked her head out into the hallway, she'd see another Val standing there keeping watch.

Just as Nyma was finishing up on the secondary antenna, Val stiffened, then cursed. "Guard patrol," she said. "Four sentries. Headed this way. Looks like they're checking every room."

Nyma nodded, trading out her toolkit for a pair of pistols and taking up post by the door. They must have tripped some alarm on their way in, or else the guard whose key card they'd swiped had finally noticed. Either way room-by-room sweeps couldn't have been a standard security measure when it was already next to impossible for prisoners to get inside the enclosure.

That meant this patrol was only the first of many hurdles to come. Perfect.

Nyma waited for the footsteps, tried to gauge the distance to the other doors and time out the periodic pauses as they cleared the other rooms on this floor. Then, at last, the patrol was at the comms room. The lock beeped, and Nyma hardly waited for the door to open before unloading with both pistols. The first two sentries dropped before they had a chance to register her presence, and Nyma stepped out into the hallway to take aim at the other two, who had been waiting just out of the line of fire.

They dropped, electronic voices sputtering and dying with a pathetic whine. Hopefully that hadn't been the start of a report back to the sentry dispatch, or things were about to get hot.

"Let's get these things out of the hallway," Nyma said, kicking the first two sentries through the door, then dragging the others in behind with Val's help. After that, they cleared out, doubling back twice on their way out to avoid more patrols. The sentry control tower was located in a separate building, behind a defensive wall and two separate security checks--but that was why they'd got after the comms first.

Nyma walked up to the first security checkpoint, not breaking strike as a sentry moved to block her path, then raised her pistols and fired two shots into the sentry's chest. Another sentry followed the same way as its friend, and then they were through, Val moving more cautiously behind. She had a pistol of her own, though she looked uncomfortable holding it. She hadn't fired a weapon, except in training, since shooting Iverson back on Earth.

Nyma couldn't really blame her. Not everyone had been born into a war, raised to defend herself and knowing all the while that a single moment of hesitation could get her family killed.

The practical side of Nyma bristled at the knowledge that Val was unreliable backup, and even just a few months ago, that side of her might have been the loudest. Sympathy was louder now, and Nyma continued on, unflinching as more sentries came to investigate the commotion. Nyma shot them each in turn, then burst into the control room, shot the two sentries and single Galra posted here, and gestured for Val to take the controls while Nyma watched the door.

"Got it," Val said, and an electronic chime underscored her words. Nyma glanced back, noted the message on screen that confirmed the deactivation of all sentries on this frequency, and nodded.

She dropped an explosive disk as they left, detonating it once they were a safe distance away, and smiled as the muffled blast sounded. Insurance.

Plus, Nyma was a fan of explosions in general.

"Last step," Nyma muttered, setting her sights on the final two buildings. The jail was closer, and easily cleared. Most of its staff had been sentries, and the few flesh-and-blood guards were already freaked out by their robot backup keeling over. Nyma had to be a little more cautious here, since the guards had already dug in, finding cover and taking aim at the door, but their hands were shaking, and all their shots went wide--even more as Nyma traded her pistols for the bayard, which took the form of a rifle for her and allowed her to pick the guards off one by one.

Then they had to clear the overseer's quarters, a sprawling, extravagant complex where the overseer and his family lived. One wing, it seemed, was where the off duty guards lived.

More to the point at the moment, it was where the guards slept.

Nyma-of-a-year-ago would have killed them all in their beds, screw anyone whose moral code took issue with that. They were Imperial soldiers, and they'd just as soon have returned the favor. But apparently joining up with Team Voltron had messed with Nyma's sense of self-preservation, because she took one look at the sleeping guards and dismissed her bayard.

"See if these lock from the outside," she whispered to Val. "We can come back and round them up when we're done."

Val's smile was entirely too pleased (and made Nyma entirely too flustered), so Nyma hurried them on their way. Most of the Galra they encountered in the rest of the building were civilians--families of the guards or the overseers, technicians who worked in the enclosure. Nyma didn't let herself think too hard about the fact that there were families here, too. That she'd already killed or wounded half a dozen guards who were on duty, and that these might be their partners and children she was rounding up and locking in other, sparsely furnished rooms.

She wanted to kill the overseer, she _really_ did. Maybe he hadn't come up with the idea for this place, but he ran it. He enforced it.

But he'd taken shelter with his wife and their young daughter, and Nyma's stomach turned at the thought of making that poor girl watch. Nyma kept her pistol trained on him for a long moment, fuming at the fear in his eyes. What right did he have to beg for his life? What right did he have to keep his family when he'd helped to rip so many apart?

Her hand was shaking.

Val pressed in close behind her, fingers ghosting over her elbow, and Nyma cursed as she holstered her pistol.

"We're shutting this place down," Nyma said, her voice sharp-edged. "Give us your access codes and we'll try to get out of here without any more bloodshed."

He complied. Of course he did; he wanted nothing more than to keep his hide intact. But rather than relief or even disgust, Nyma felt only tired as she locked the overseer and his family in with the rest of the staff and began the long, slow process of tracking down all the prisoners.

* * *

Allura rose early the next morning, as usual, but rather than head directly for the bridge to get started on the day's work, she made her way down to the Black Lion's hangar. Shiro and Black had found their daily conversations to be incredibly helpful--enough so that Allura had been wary of disrupting the careful dynamic they had in place. Even without knowing the details of what they discussed, she knew it touched on a number of sensitive topics, and the last thing Allura wanted was to intrude.

Black was quick to dismiss that notion, of course, and it wasn't until Allura descended into the Heart alongside Shiro and found a profound sense of peace waiting for her that she realized Shiro and Black weren't the only ones who might benefit from this.

It had been two weeks now, and Allura had joined Black and Shiro four times, so she had some sense of what she was getting into--and as a result, when she walked into the hangar early the morning after the ambush at the Zhek Chain she knew at once that something had happened.

Shiro was waiting for her in the cockpit, and he greeted her the same way he always did--but here inside Black it didn't matter how well he covered. His presence in the bond was still subdued, and he shied away from Allura's concern.

"Ready?" He settled back in his chair, his hands curled around the armrests, the seat slightly reclined to be more comfortable. Black, as usual, had provided another chair for Allura where her pedestals usually stood. Allura wasn't sure if it was actually possible for her to fall over while her mind was in the Heart, but it was probably better not to find out. She sat, frowning at the back of Shiro's chair, and let her Quintessence catch on familiar channels that carried her deeper into Black's consciousness.

As far as Allura could tell, there was no set agenda to these conversations. When Allura was there, they always began with an invitation for her to lead the conversation, should she desire. The first time she'd come, she was ashamed to say, she'd ended up filling the hour with angry rants about her father's lies and the failures that had led to Zarkon's defection.

 _Don't apologize,_ Shiro had told her after they were done. _That's what this time is for. We don't always have something that's weighing on us; sometimes we talk about the good times. But when there's something eating at us--dreams, fears, frustrations, any of it... Don't hold it in. Not when we're together like that. It's easier to face it together, isn't it?_

He wasn't wrong. Once Allura got over the immediate shame of having broken down so completely in front of them both, she realized that she did feel lighter. It was like Shiro and Black had siphoned off some of the hurt and confusion. They'd seen her inner turmoil and echoed it, validating her feelings without letting them consume her.

It helped so much, in fact, that she had half a mind to follow Shiro's lead and do this every day, except that it was something he'd started with Black because of their shared trauma. Allura couldn't relate to that, not completely, and she didn't want to take away Shiro's safe spaces entirely.

"So," Shiro said, taking shape in the Heart a moment after Allura arrived. The shallow water underfoot rippled around his ankles, making the reflected stars dance. "Anything you want to talk about?"

The sound of the waves changed as Black materialized, crystalline _plinks_ echoing through the silence.

Allura glanced at her, then returned her gaze to Shiro, who studied the horizon, his mind feeling as far away. He sensed her attention on the weight in the pit of his stomach, and his shoulders tensed. He said nothing, but she knew at once the shape of his thoughts.

Not yet.

He would talk about it--he wanted to talk about it, before they were done today--but he needed more time to find the words.

Fair enough. Allura could fill the time until he was ready.

"I don't want to talk about my father today," she said. Better to be up front about it, since she knew that was what Shiro and Black were expecting. She'd talked about him each time she came, even if only for a short time. Sometimes it was vitriol that came spewing out of her, roused from deep wells she never seemed to find the bottom of. Sometimes it was something softer, and she carried them through memories of a different face her father had once worn, the face of a kind and loving father.

Her throat no longer seized with tears when she thought his name. Panic no longer closed in around her heart at the thought of someone else damning him.

But today, memories of her father were steeped in bitterness, and she knew if she started down that path she would spend the whole day sinking deeper and deeper into spite. She would find Coran later, after she'd seen to the day's duties, and talk with him about it. She found their conversations helped as much as these ones with Shiro and Black, not because he could see into her soul, but precisely because he didn't need to. He shared her pain because he was there beside her in the pits of resentment.

_**There is something else.** _

Black's voice cut through Allura's thoughts, soothing the seething cauldron of venom in her core. She breathed, leaning into the hand Shiro placed on her back, and slowly bitterness yielded to a deeper, more cutting ache.

Motion on the surface of the water caught Allura's eye, and she stared down at her reflection, which glowed with an internal light, painting it in crisper lines than the starlight should have allowed. A breeze picked up from the south, disrupting the image for long seconds as Allura gathered the ache in her chest and slowly released it into the bond.

The water stilled, and an image of Meri stood beside Allura's reflection, glowing with that same ethereal light.

Allura's vision blurred, and she pressed a hand to her face, cursing the unexpected upswell of emotion.

"I miss her."

As if in response to Allura's words, Meri's image grinned, then caught Allura's reflection by the wrist and dragged her off. Their light skimmed across the surface of the water, memories springing up from the waves like holograms where it passed. A younger Meri blushing as she introduced herself to Allura on the day she joined the apprenticeship program. The two of them, only a little older, dressed in EVA suits to survey a field of Xacanthum crystals on the hull of the castle-ship. The final hug they shared before Allura's father put her into stasis--a stolen moment in the corridors that already seemed haunted. The moment they'd found each other again on Earth, as Meri's disguise melted away. Their first kiss.

Allura turned away, and the images shattered, falling to the water like stardust. "Sorry," she said, and neither of her companions had to tell her not to apologize. She felt it in the arms encircling her shoulders, in the warmth that coiled around her heart. "It hit me last night. I caught myself wanting to go find her to complain about the politicians I'd just finished dealing with. I... I suppose I'd been trying not to think about it, but I haven't heard from her since I returned from Oriande."

No one had.

The knowledge hung in the bond--Shiro thinking about the messages Coran had sent along to the only contact they had for Meri. Ordinary well-wishes along with more practical requests for information and warnings about things Pidge had found in Imperial files. At the same time, Black's mind went to Blue, who hadn't been able to clearly sense Meri since she'd gone away. It was a strain on her, and on her paladins.

Allura's voice was small. She _felt_ small, with her head on Shiro's shoulder and the Black Lion towering over them both. "I suppose it's  selfish of me, to wish we had more time, when there's still a war on. But we'd only just found each other. I thought... I thought that would be it. We'd have each other, and we'd spend the rest of the war that way."

The fear snuck up on her, closing around her throat. "You don't think something's happened to her, do you?"

Shiro stilled, and Allura suddenly heard her own words.

"Sorry," she said, flushing. "It's silly, getting so anxious about this. Meri is perfectly capable of taking care of herself--I know that. It's just..."

"You worry."

Something in Shiro's voice stopped Allura in her tracks, and she turned to look at him, the fear slowly sliding into focus. Not her own fear, sneaking up on her.

Shiro's fear, bleeding through the bond.

"What is it?" She paused. "Akira?"

The memories hovered just out of Allura's grasp. She didn't strain for them, but their barriers were deliberately low in this space. She could hardly fail to see something so prevalent in Shiro's thoughts.

"No," Shiro said, holding up his hands. "We'll get to me. You wanted to talk about Meri."

"And we've talked," Allura said, letting an exasperated smile shine through. "I miss her, and I thank you for your sympathy, but we both know there's nothing to be done." She paused. "Talk. I want something to think about that isn't how far away my girlfriend is."

The look Shiro gave her, a wry smile with an affectionate shake of the head, said he'd caught at least some of what she left unsaid--she was lonely, yes, but she could sense Shiro's troubles. She knew they were more pressing than her own, and she knew he'd been working himself up to this since she arrived. At a gentle rumble from Black, he finally relented.

"So I was going to talk to Akira," he said. "About... I don't know. About Kerberos, maybe."

_**Understandable. The beginning is not as difficult as what came after.** _

"Exactly." Shiro sighed. "Except I didn't make it that far."

Shiro's guilt fluttered in Allura's chest, anxiety narrowing her vision to the restless motion of Shiro's fingers. He'd crossed his arms, and the fingers of his left hand tapped a quick rhythm on his prosthetic. Frowning, Allura pulled more of Shiro's anxiety into herself, even as she separated it from herself--easier with someone else's emotions than her own. Shiro's thoughts were too frantic for her to see clearly the root of his unease, but she saw Akira in his mind's eye. Akira with a grimace of pain on his face. Akira, sharp with anger. Akira, shutting a door in Shiro's face.

 _ **You were afraid,**_ Black said. She seemed to have gleaned more details than Allura, either because of the nature of the paladin bond or because of the hours she'd spent with Shiro in the Heart, their minds intertwined. _**You cannot fault yourself for that.**_

Shiro's hands closed around his elbows, his mood souring. "Maybe not for feeling afraid, but for acting the way I did?"

"Sorry," Allura said. "What happened?"

Shiro breathed in, and as he exhaled Allura could practically see Black draw out another generous portion of his anxiety. "You heard about the Guard mission yesterday? The way the Galra sent a robeast in after they broke through the blockade?"

Ah. Well, that explained a lot. "Coran said Akira was hurt."

For a moment, Shiro closed his eyes, looking like he was going to be sick. "Every time he goes out there, I--I guess I expect him to not come back. I know what the Galra can do. When I heard Akira was hurt, I assumed the worst."

"I would think anyone would do the same upon hearing that a loved one had been injured in battle."

But it was more than that, wasn't it? Akira represented everything Shiro had lost in the Arena. The innocence of his younger years, the optimism and boundless energy he'd had when he left for Kerberos. He didn't want Zarkon and Haggar to ruin Akira, too.

Allura's heart ached, and she reached out to lay a hand on Shiro's arm.

Frustration coiled around Shiro, constricting the bond as his walls automatically tried to go up. Black leaned forward, and the starlight pulsed in a slow rhythm. Allura found herself matching it with the rhythm of her breathing, and after a moment, Shiro did the same.

"I panicked," he said. "I panicked, and I told him he shouldn't be out there fighting. He was scared, too--he'd just watched his men die--but did I care about that?"

The bond reverberated with the deeper, darker thoughts Shiro couldn't voice. _I'm supposed to be better than this,_ and, _He was hurting, and I didn't even notice,_ and, _I can't blame him for hating me._

Allura's heart sank, and she pivoted to face Shiro head-on and take him by the shoulders. "He doesn't hate you."

Shiro sucked in a sharp breath and shook his head. "No, I know, he's too good for that. I just..." He trailed off, seeming not to know where to take the sentence. Or maybe he just realized that lying wasn't worth the effort here. His head knew that Akira wouldn't stay angry forever, but that didn't stop the guilt and fear from tearing him up inside.

 _ **Breathe,**_ Black said. _**You are too hard on yourself.**_

"But we've been working on this," Shiro said. "I can't control everything. I shouldn't try. I don't want to be that person."

Black rumbled, abandoning her usual form to become the black house cat who had curled up in Allura's arms when her anger at her father finally bled dry, leaving her spent and shaking. She paused before Shiro now, and he hesitated only for a moment before picking her up and holding her to his chest.

 _ **Honesty,**_ she said, rumbling with a purr. _**That is what I ask of you, not perfection. Remember that. It is not a failure if fear sometimes gets the best of you. You have been honest with us. Be honest with Akira, as well. He will not begrudge you a moment of weakness.**_

"Black is right," Allura said. "Give Akira time to mourn the Guardsmen who died and to recover from his injuries. Give yourself time to decide on what you want to say. Then talk."

He breathed in, then nodded on the exhale. "You're right. I'll... I'll try."

Black looked up at him and rubbed her head on his chin. _**That is all anyone can ask.** _

* * *

Nyma was tired.

It had been a long two days, full of a lot of flying around the valley and even more hiking (in order to at least _try_ not to scare the skittish prisoners into hiding.) And convincing everyone that they really were free, no strings attached, was more work than Nyma would have thought possible, not to mention herding them all back to the Blue Lion and getting them all on board without anyone running off to grab one last thing they'd left at home...

(They'd been here for a long time, some of them. They were used to scrounging by, which meant they put a disproportionate value on little luxuries, like their nice kettle or the blanket they'd made by hand over the course of two entire years. It was completely understandable that they'd want to hold onto those things. It was also damn frustrating for the people trying not to leave anyone behind.)

But none of that was the reason Nyma was dragging by the end of the day. Two trips to the castle, first to drop off the former prisoners and to confer with Coran, then a quick trip back to collect the overseer, his staff, and their families. Nyma would have been perfectly all right leaving them where they were as a little bit of assisted karma, but Val was a better person at heart, and she convinced Nyma that they should at least bring them to the castle.

"Not too late to opt for the dungeon," Nyma said as they set down in the hangar.

Val smacked her arm. "We're not throwing these people in the dungeon."

Nyma made a face. "But we do have one, right?"

Val gave her a look, then walked out without another word. A small compliment of Guard pilots met them by the cargo hold ramp, to escort the two dozen Galra to their new quarters. Most of the Guard was busy with another mission, apparently, but Coran seemed not to be expecting the pseudo-prisoners to put up much of a fight. They would be housed on an empty floor of Blue Tower, sandwiched between Guard quarters and training areas, and given limited clearance. One part deterrence, one part security, two parts mercy--mercy in that they wouldn't be punished for their Imperial work, and mercy in that they'd be treated better here than any prisoners of the Galra.

They were prisoners, though, at least for now. Shiro and Allura could decide what to do with them in the long term, though considering how many bigger threats there were in the universe, they'd probably just be relocated somewhere they couldn't leak any valuable information.

By the time all was said and done, Nyma was ready to drop. It wasn't a physical exhaustion, though her legs did ache from hiking all over the valley, and it wasn't a mental exhaustion. It was purely an emotional one. She'd had one too many former prisoners ask her where their families were, or simple break down in tears on her shoulder once they realized that they wouldn't have to break their backs just to not starve.

"You okay?" Val asked, following Nyma into her room. Val wrapped her arms around Nyma's waist and poked her head around her arm. "You seem a little down."

Nyma disentangled herself from Val's embrace, her skin prickling with one too many touches from strangers. "I'm fine."

Val frowned. Didn't say anything, just hugged herself, watched Nyma from across the room, and waited. Nyma tried to ignore her as she got ready for bed, but those eyes followed her everywhere she went, itching at things Nyma would rather not address tonight. Like the fact that she was letting herself get way to invested in these rescue missions. Bad enough to tie her stomach up in knots over the prisoners, but to do the same over the ones running the colonies? Nyma was better than this.

Nyma had also surrounded herself with bleeding hearts for long enough that she couldn't very well complain about picking up some of their habits.

She sighed, tossing her sweaty tanktop down the laundry chute and pulling on a pair of silk pajamas before returning to where Val waited by the bed. "Don't worry about me. Seriously. I'm just tired."

Val cocked her head to the side, eyes darting back and forth like there was writing on Nyma's face she could read if she just focused hard enough. "This is about more than just the mission today, isn't it?"

Nyma's chest tightened. She started to pull away, but Val took her by the arms and sat her on the bed.

"Nyma," she said, leaning in close. "You can talk to me."

And that was the problem, wasn't it? The longer Val stayed here, the more likely Nyma was to spill everything, and she didn't want to think about this right now. She'd jumped into the mission precisely to forget about the message she'd found waiting on her personal comms unit this morning.

But Val was still there, brow furrowed in concern, all patience and encouragement, and Nyma could feel her barriers weakening.

Groaning, she leaned backward, yanking open the bedside table drawer and grabbing the comms unit. "Here," she said, shoving it at Val. "Read it."

Val frowned at the comm, then at Nyma, and then started reading, her face tightening with each line. When she finished, she read it again, and Nyma started to squirm, seriously considering escaping to the shower just so she didn't have to wait for Val to finish.

"What is this?"

"What does it look like? It was waiting for me when I woke up this morning. No signature. I even had Beezer try to trace the signal, but... nothing." Not that Nyma needed someone to tell her who had sent the message. The Delegate--or at least, the person Nyma had taken to calling the Delegate, seeing as he'd provided her with nothing but a tablet from a runner who had pretended to work for one of the delegates at the summit on Eltava.

Val shook her head, swiping the screen like she could make the message give her more details. "This is it?" She was getting angry now, her words clipped and her chin jutting out defiantly. "Not even any proof or _anything_?"

Nyma snorted. "Of course not. That might actually be helpful."

"That's..." Val sighed. "Yeah." She tossed the comm onto the comforter between them. "Think he's telling the truth?"

Nyma stared down at the screen, where the Delegate's message was still on full display. Nyma couldn't quite read it from here, but she'd read it enough times this morning to practically have it memorized.

_Lady Paladin, my apologies for contacting you like this, but time is short and Haggar's eyes are everywhere. As promised, I have continued to look into the disappearance of your friend, Rolo, and I can assure you he is still alive. More than that, I can tell you that he has been transferred to a project referred to only as 'Vindication' in Imperial records. I don't yet have access to the restricted files on this project, but my men are continuing to work. I will be in touch as soon as we know more._

Nyma pulled her feet up on the bed and wrapped her arms around her knees. "I don't know what to think. Depends on if this guy knows Pidge found that video about their dad, I guess. Seems like a big coincidence if he's just making shit up, but if he knows what we know and he's trying to taunt us?"

"What better way than telling us Rolo and Commander Holt are in the same place?" Val sighed, then stood and came to stand in front of Nyma. She coaxed Nyma's arms down, then her legs, then straddled her lap, taking Nyma's face in her hands. "You want to tell Pidge about this?"

Nyma shook her head, a little breathless and not at all willing to break contact with Val. The touch was light, almost torturously so, and it mesmerized Nyma. "About what? A mysterious message from a faceless stranger? For all we know, he's just fucking with us. No... No. Not until we have more."

Val nodded. "Talk to Coran about it tomorrow? Maybe try and get in touch with Meri and have her follow up?"

That sounded smart. Nyma was having trouble thinking just now, between the fatigue and Val's proximity, so she just nodded, taking hold of Val's waist. "Sure. Tomorrow."

Val grinned. "I take it you don't want to worry about it any more tonight?"

"Gods, no." She didn't wait for more of Val's teasing, just pulled her down into a kiss that was slow and languid and erased most other considerations. Val's skin was still sticky with sweat, her lips salty and chapped, her fingers desperate where they dug into Nyma's skin.

This was good. This was simple. There was no second-guessing here, no tearing herself apart. There was no question, either, that Nyma had let herself get much too invested much too fast, but she couldn't make herself care. Right now, she needed not to think.

* * *

Meri was not ready for this.

She stood alone at the center of a circle of druids, trying to calm her racing heart. The calm that usually came with using an alias had deserted her, maybe because Haggar was standing less than ten feet away from her, cold disinterest in her eyes as she looked Meri up and down. Ten feet away, with a dozen other druids backing her up. If she saw through Meri's disguise, there would be no escape.

She wasn't panicking, at least. Maybe because she was in shock. Maybe because she was too busy reevaluating the string of choices that had brought her here. But she wasn't panicking.

And she was optimistic that her pounding heart wouldn't get her killed, because after all who wouldn't get a little rush of adrenaline when facing down the most famous, most powerful, most sadistic witch in the entire empire?

Breathe.

She had to breathe.

"So you think you deserve a place in our circle, is that right?"

There was the barest trace of humor in Haggar's voice, and it raised the hairs along the back of Meri's neck. More than just her neck. She'd gotten used to wearing a Galra shift lately, so she rarely noticed her fur, but it was all bristling now, her skin prickling from scalp to shoulder blades.

She bit down on the fear, channeling it into anger instead. "That's right," she said, baring her teeth. "I know I have the skill. I know I have the strength. Let me prove myself."

A smile tugged at Haggar's lips, and Meri knew at once she'd made a mistake.

"Prove yourself, indeed." Haggar turned away, flicking her fingers toward one of the other druids. "Find somewhere for Reza to stay while we prepare her qualifying exam."


	33. Anomalies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Val, Ryner, and the Holts have been digging into Quitnessence theory for the last several weeks in search of something that might help them find Sam, Rolo, and Rax, but so far they've met with little success. Meanwhile Shiro and Akira got into a fight after the Guard fought a robeast, and after talking with Allura and the Black Lion, Shiro promised to talk to his brother after they'd both had a chance to cool down.

Fifty-six.

Fifty-six Guardsmen dead fighting the robeast at the Zhek Chain. Another eleven on extended leave, and an untold number shaken after witnessing the carnage.

On the bright side, though several hundred civilians had been injured in the battle, there had been only four fatalities. Four too many, Akira thought, but it could have been so much worse.

Layeni had the report waiting for him when he emerged from the cryopod two days after the battle. Akira was certain it had been ready before he went in the night before, but she’d blocked his every attempt to take charge of the situation. He was injured, she said. He needed to rest, she said.

Personally, Akira thought she was knew him too well. If he’d seen those numbers before a cryopod opened up, he would have had fuck all patience for rest, and he’d have been out in Blue Tower around the clock, injury or no.

He wanted to do that now, too, but by this point most of the work was done. The last round of wounded were being rotated into the cryopods to fix broken bones and minor burns—the sorts of things that needed only a few hours to heal. Those who needed physical therapy had already made appointments with the medical staff, and Coran had sent the castle’s core team of engineers to help repair the fleet. Layeni had even handled the fallout with the Zhek leaders, so Akira’s tour of the Guard barracks turned up nothing more pressing than his own recuperation.

Still he managed to spend most of the day with his men, reassuring those who needed it, whether they needed to know that they’d be okay, or that Akira was. By late afternoon, he felt drained, both physically and emotionally, but he was too restless to think about sleep, so he wandered the castle halls in search of a distraction.

A distraction he found in the form of his brother. Takashi had kept his distance after their argument, and Akira had spent the day in Blue Tower, where Takashi rarely had reason to go.

If Akira knew his brother at all, then he hadn’t had any more rest than Akira the last few days, and they certainly hadn’t had time to talk. Akira didn't want to be the one to bring it up—either Takashi’s reaction to the close call or his own response. Takashi had been scared, Akira hurting on more levels than one. Neither of them had been thinking straight.

It wasn't an easy conversation to have, but avoiding the issue wouldn’t fix things. From the way Takashi's shoulders hitched at the sight of Akira, the fight weighed on him. It weighed on Akira, too. He’d never liked fighting with his brother. Rare as they were, their fights had a tendency to get ugly.

They also, unfortunately, didn’t have much practice making up.

So, roundabout apology it was.

Akira forced himself to relax, smiling a disarming smile before Takashi could get it into his head to make a break for it. "Hey."

"Hey..."

Akira noted Takashi's clothes--loose-fitting sweats and a tank-top--and arrived at the obvious conclusion. "Going to the training deck?"

"Yeah. Been a long week."

"Mind if I tag along?"

It was a loaded question, and they both knew it. Takashi had told Akira he shouldn’t be out there, and Akira’s words amounted to a challenge. He wasn’t going to step back. He wasn’t going to stick to the sidelines.

He also wasn’t going to shut his brother out. Not as long as Takashi didn’t shut him out first.

Takashi arched an eyebrow, though he didn't protest. He would know that Akira didn't spend much time on this training deck. The Guard had their own shooting range, where Akira had been working on his aim--never great, but never terrible. Most of his time had gone to the flight sims, though, since the Guard was mostly deployed in deep space battles, when they weren't providing humanitarian aid on the ground.

Close combat? Not Akira's strong suit.

"Sure," Takashi said. “Two-on-one against the gladiator?”

"Actually, I was thinking we could spar. Layeni wants to move the Guard along to hand-to-hand drills, and I figure it's probably best if I know enough not to completely humiliate myself before I start training with them."

Takashi snorted, then held up his hands like that made it better. "Sorry."

Akira rolled his eyes, elbowing his brother in the side. "Not all of us are built like a superhero, you know."

"Yeah, and not all of us picked a fight at school every other week for three years, what's your point?"

"Those assholes had it coming!"

"And you did such a good job of dishing out karmic vengeance," Takashi said dryly.

Akira stuck his tongue out, for lack of a more eloquent comeback that wasn't revisionist history. He _had_ picked fights with all the bullies in basically every school he'd ever attended, and he _had_ always needed Takashi to come bail him out. Some people were just born with more spite than physical prowess.

"So are we doing this or not?"

Takashi shrugged, a mischievous gleam in his eye. "Just don't complain when you get your ass handed to you."

* * *

"Do you think Zarkon just straight-up doesn't realize different Balmera are, well, _different_?" Hunk asked.

Shay's mind was a distracted hum, but even so Hunk had no doubt that she knew what he meant. They'd been chasing this Balmera for almost two weeks at this point, following leads Pidge had dug up during their slow recovery. References were vague, rumors plentiful, but they'd finally tracked her down in a meandering orbit around twin stars.

She was notably healthier than the Metos Balmera had been, her Quintessence reserves deeper and the mines not yet as expansive. Probably that was down to the twin stars, which provided her more energy than either Metos or Theros had had access to, and the fact that she hadn't been under Zarkon's control for quite so long.

That wasn’t to say she was in peak condition. There were anomalies in her Quintessence output that Hunk couldn’t explain, and despite plentiful reserves, her surface remained barren. She was smaller than the other Balmera, too, though she produced just as many crystals for the Empire as other Balmera in the records. Hunk could only assume that meant the Balmerans who lived here were severely overworked.

The setup here was an almost perfect clone of the setup on each of the last Balmera, in fact. Same particle barriers, turrets, and barracks on the surface, same hangars hidden just underground, and from the BLIP-tech scans, the tunnels were mostly patrolled by sentries. Hunk didn’t have exact counts, but he was pretty sure the operations hadn’t even been scaled down to account for this Balmera’s smaller size.

It offended Hunk not just on a humanitarian level, as someone who had fallen in love with the Balmeran people, but even--however shallow it might be--on a purely mechanical level. What kind of lazy-ass project manager had approved this copy-paste bullshit? It somehow managed to be both a waste of resources and an unsustainable strain on the Balmerans living here, and that was flat-out unacceptable.

Shay came out of her distraction with a hum, falling into a calming melody, and Hunk flushed.

"Sorry. I know there are bigger issues here, I just." He hummed in frustration--a curious blend of the disgruntled rumbling he'd always done and a new melody that had become second nature after the Unity without Hunk even noticing the shift. "You would think, if the crystal shortage is such a big deal in the Empire, that they would at least do the bare minimum to make sure the resources they have are being used efficiently."

Amusement colored Shay's song for a moment, so Hunk could at least take comfort in the fact that his indignation had pulled Shay out of her head. She'd been growing increasingly distracted the last few days as they closed in on these coordinates and started the reconnaissance.

"They will not be able to mismanage the Balmera for much longer," Shay said, fighting down a smile. "You can be assured of that."

Hunk laughed, then squared his shoulders and pulled up the file where they'd been making notes on how they were going to handle the liberation. "Are we all ready to go, then?"

"I believe so?" Shay hesitated, her mind flicking toward one scan in particular and dragging Hunk's and Yellow's with her.

Anxiety curdled in Hunk's stomach at the reminder. They'd been getting odd glitches on their scans ever since they arrived--never the same thing twice, and never anything that in and of itself would be cause for concern. These glitches, more than anything, had prompted the delay. They'd wanted to start the attack two days ago, but none of them had been sure about anything with all the odd readings.

But even sending the results back to the castle for Coran and Pidge to review had turned up nothing else concrete, and beyond the glitches, it all seemed pretty straightforward. Go in quiet, reach out to the locals through the Balmera song, hit the Empire where it hurt, and try to minimize the collateral damage.

They were ready--as ready as they could be--and putting it off longer wasn't going to change anything substantial about the fight ahead of them. It was time to move.

Hunk just hoped the butterflies in his stomach were regular old anxiety and not a premonition.

Shay activated Yellow's cloak before heading in, her eyes on a ridge overlooking one of the Galra camps. Halfway to the surface, the power flickered. Hunk's first thought was that Zarkon had developed some kind of anti-stealth technology, and he braced himself for an attack.

But the flicker lasted less than a second, quick enough that they didn't even lose the cloak. It still left Hunk feeling queasy, and he pressed a warning into the bond that Shay answered with her own concern.

Something strange was happening here.

They landed without further incident, and Hunk slid into the song along with Shay, his head spinning at the advent of hundreds of new voices. He understood now what Shay meant when she called it a different dialect. He recognized the song, and he was able to follow the broad strokes of conversation--the ripples of shock that spread outward from Hunk and Shay's arrival, the wariness, the hope. These people were tired, and they teetered on the brink of despair, but they were not yet crushed.

The finer details, though, flew right over Hunk's head. The song contained no words, so he couldn't just ask the Balmerans to repeat or rephrase what they were trying to tell him, but he still felt like the meaning was on the tip of his tongue.

Fortunately, Shay proved a better interpreter than Hunk. She'd spent a lot of time with the Metos Balmerans, learning their song and studying the differences between it and the one she’d grown up with. The specifics may have been different here, but she kept her head, sorted through the song, and relayed what she learned to Hunk.

An unnamed fear permeated this Balmera. The people were desperate enough to stand with Hunk and Shay, but unlike on Metos, very few of them had tried to fight back on their own. Shay couldn't pinpoint the source of the fear, but she thought that might be because the Balmerans themselves didn't know much about the threat. All they knew was that the Galra sometimes took people away for a time, and that they returned with stories of a shadowy something that could wipe out everyone living here if it were ever unleashed.

Hunk grimaced, staring out over the barracks and turrets down below. "I guess I'm taking the creepy tunnel monster?"

"And I will rally the other Balmerans as best I can," Shay said. She squeezed his hand, and then they were off.

* * *

Akira hit the floor hard, and if the fall wasn't enough to wind him, Takashi's knee coming down in the center of his back certainly was. He tapped the floor twice, gasping for air (perhaps a touch over-dramatically) when Takashi let him up. Akira rolled over, flinging his arms out to the side, and made a face at the burn in his muscles. Good thing he’d been in a cryopod this morning, ‘cause he couldn’t tell now.

They'd been at this for a little over an hour, most of which had gone to Takashi demonstrating moves and Akira trying to mimic them, but they'd both grown bored after a while and had launched into sparring, never mind they knew they were horribly mismatched.

(Takashi asking three times if Akira was _sure_ he wanted to do this, and _maybe I should go easy on you_ didn't help the logical side of his brain gain any ground in the internal argument.)

Well, now Akira had been thrown twice and pinned four more times, and he was starting to regret not just yielding to fatigue and going to bed early.

"You want another rematch?" Takashi asked. Every time before, he'd at least tried to hide his amusement, but he had apparently grown beyond such concerns and was openly gloating now.

Akira moaned, flinging his arm across his eyes.

Takashi laughed. "Oh, come on. You were close that time!"

Akira lifted his arm, scowling up at Takashi, who was grinning broadly. He'd hardly even broken a sweat, the bastard. "You don't have to be so smug about it."

"Sure I do," Takashi said, grabbing Akira by the wrist and elbow and hauling him to his feet. The fact that Akira went dead-weight hardly fazed him, and Akira had no choice but to stand or to have his brother drop him like a sack of potatoes. Takashi clapped him on the shoulder hard enough to piss off his already aching muscles. "When else am I going to get a chance to do this?"

"Certainly not in the future if you're gonna be a little shit about it."

"Akira," Takashi said, feigning solemnity. "I'm always a little shit. I just know how to hide it."

"At least you're honest." Akira muttered, but he was grinning now, too. If aching muscles and a bruised ego were the price he had to pay to chase away the awkwardness filling the air between them, then he would call it a fair trade.

But the awkwardness was gone now, and Akira didn’t want to make his body hate him any more than it already did. He waved off Takashi's silent offer of another round, retreating instead to the side of the training deck and claiming a water pouch from the recessed storage locker. He grabbed a second one, but pulled it out of Takashi's reach, glowering at him as he sat down, poked the straws into both packets, and drank through both at once.

Takashi's eyebrows crept upward, but he made no comment as he grabbed his own water pouch and sat beside Akira, looking for all the world like he'd just gone for a leisurely stroll through the park.

"You're not _bad_ \--"

Akira held up a hand, though he had to pull one straw out of his mouth to do so. "Don't coddle me, Takashi. I know exactly how much of a noodle I am."

Takashi's lips quirked, but he held onto his composure by a thin margin and patted Akira's knee. "I wouldn't call you a noodle. You're... scrappy."

"Because that's so much better?"

Takashi shrugged, completely unapologetic. "Maybe you should train with Keith and Matt. I may have learned to fight dirty to get around bigger opponents, but I'm not going to ignore the fact that I had a certain amount of brute strength on my side. My fighting style revolves around giving and taking a lot of hits, and frankly, I got used to having a nearly indestructible weapon grafted to my arm. You don't have that, and there's no reason you should act like you do."

Training with Matt and Keith honestly wasn't a bad idea. They both used swords, and that wasn't exactly what Akira was looking for, but he was much closer to the two of them in build, so he very well might pick up more useful tips from them than from his brother.

He wasn't thinking about training now, though. Takashi's smile had dimmed a little when he brought up the Arena. He'd fallen silent now, his gaze far away, and Akira's heart ached with sympathy. Neither of them had said anything, but Akira liked to think he was an observant guy. He knew that his brother’s trauma had had a hand in the way things went down after the robeast battle.

"I’m sorry," Takashi said, almost as though he'd read Akira's mind.

Akira turned to look at the opposite wall, though he leaned over until his shoulder was touching Takashi's. "You don’t have to apologize. I overreacted, too."

"No, I...” Takashi blew out a long breath, running his hand through his hair. “I was out of line. I know that, and I take full responsibility for the way it played out. I don’t want you to take any of this as an excuse, but… I promised Black I'd try to talk about this stuff more. About what happened to me. About how it still affects me when, for example, I hear my brother got hurt in a lopsided battle against one of Haggar’s monstrosities."

Akira turned, studying the side of Takashi’s face. His expression was solemn but resolute, and he turned his head enough to meet Akira’s eyes.

"Okay,” Akira said. “I'm listening."

Takashi smiled, breathing in and holding it for several seconds. "Okay," he said at last. "I guess I should start at the beginning."

* * *

Shay sent a dozen Balmerans to help Hunk find the source of the fear in the tunnels. Three Balmeran "instigators" were being held in cells near the shadow on the collective consciousness. It was odd, the way Hunk could map the song onto the tunnels directly, identifying individuals by their voices and pulling on the shared understanding to fill in the hazy sense he had of where he was.

The cells were straight forward: metal doors anchored into the stone walls and locked with standard Imperial locks. A pair of sentries stood guard at the end of the tunnel. Hunk gestured for his companions to wait as he stepped around the corner, bayard in hand, and gunned the sentries down.

With a thought, he turned his bayard into an energy blade that severed one sentry's arm at the elbow, letting him take it to each cell lock in turn to trigger the release. Three shaken Balmerans stumbled out, faces crumpling as they caught sight of the others.

"Get them to safety," he said to the ones who welcomed them most fiercely. The song suggested they were family, or perhaps bonded pairs, and they sang their gratitude to Hunk as he turned to the other six. Former prisoners, he gathered. They'd sensed this mysterious danger, and they wanted to help take it out. "The rest of you, take me to this tunnel."

They exchanged looks, and then a woman named Klex led the way. "Quietly," she warned. "The thing they keep here kills our Balmera a little more each day. If we are discovered, it will be the end for us all."

Her song warned that this was not hyperbole, and the other five echoed the sentiment. Hunk's nerves thrummed with anxious energy, but he nodded, readying his bayard as he followed Klex farther down the tunnel to another, larger door.

Something was breathing in the darkness beyond.

"That's probably not good," Hunk murmured, his mind going to the zombie-like creatures they'd found on Vel-17. Not that he hadn't run into other horrifying things since then, but the Ziva were one of the most terrifying parts of his early adventures--the Ziva and getting stranded alone on the castle-ship when Sendak took it over. He knew, intellectually, that he'd probably deal with either in a snap now, but that didn't make them any less terrifying in retrospect.

Thankfully, Hunk had learned a few things since then, and he pulled up his armor's scanners before he made any move to open the door.

"Aw, heck," he muttered, stomach turning over at the erratic readings. He opened his mouth to call for Shay, and her voice in the song quieted, sensing his attention. Then he remembered his companions, who were visibly shaking just being this close to whatever Balmera-killing monster Haggar had stored behind this door. Thinking quickly, Hunk closed his eyes and tried to piece together the shape of the tunnels here. "Hey, am I right in thinking there are some tunnels that come around close to this chamber?"

Klex glanced at the others, a note of uncertainty creeping into her song. "I believe so, yes..."

"Close enough that, if you went and rounded up some other volunteers and got in position, you could help your Balmera crush a big, scary monster?"

Sucking in a sharp breath, Klex darted a look at the cell door. "Someone would need to tell us when it was in position."

Hunk didn't say anything, just wove reassurance into his song. It was imprecise, as communication went, but he would be able to track their position, and they ought to be able to pick up the big, blaring imperative he'd send out when it was time.

Klex shook her head, and a line of thin rods that dangled from her carapace clacked together like a wooden wind chime. "You are a brave man, Paladin Hunk. We will do what we can to aid you."

He flashed a thumbs-up, then waited until the Balmerans were out of sight before raising Shay on the comms. "How's it coming?" he asked, straining for cheer.

There was a frown in Shay's voice, echoed faintly in the song. "Slowly. I have gathered those who are able to fight, but the Galra are more concentrated here than on Metos. Striking without casualties will not be easy."

"You want a distraction? Cause I'm about to pick a fight with a monster and try to catch it in a cave-in."

Shay was silent for several seconds before she sighed. "Hunk--"

"I'm being careful."

"Should I come aid you?"

"No." Hunk shook his head. "You need to take out the Imperial forces. I'll let you know when we're ready to go."

Shay hummed an affirmative, and Hunk turned his attention back to Klex and the other Balmerans. They'd gathered a few more helpers--Hunk wasn't yet practiced enough in the Balmera song to make an exact count--and were making their way down narrow side tunnels to flank the creature in the cell.

Hunk placed his hand on the wall and closed his eyes, trying to get a better picture of the chamber beyond the steel door. The Balmera's vision was oddly blurred--not just because there were no Balmerans within, but because of the creature itself and the damage it had done. He was able to pick out only the general shape of the tunnel. Long and twisting, it ended in a largish chamber, which was where Hunk sensed the most Quintessence. (Unusual Quintessence, and unnerving, though he couldn't put his finger on why.) Just before the chamber, the tunnel narrowed. That was their best option for pinning the monster, and would require the least work on the Balmera's part.

Suddenly, from deep within the tunnel, something screamed. Not an animalistic scream; something eerily human. Hunk could almost imagine words to the sound.

At the same moment, the lock on the door turned green, and the door slid aside, opening onto the long, dark stretch of tunnel.

" _Vex_." Shay's voice was soft, but Hunk could sense her fear from several tunnels over. "Hunk, they have spotted us. We must move now; we cannot wait. If you--"

The comms crackled, the sound cutting out, then coming back muffled and echoing. Hunk pressed a hand to his helmet. "Shay? Shay, I can't hear you."

Something scraped against stone, a faltering, uneven step that made Hunk's mouth run dry. He summoned his bayard, the crackling comms forgotten as he stared down the darkness, squinting to see what lurked within. Hunk switched on the light mounted on the side of his helmet, and the glow swept down the tunnel. Curves of stone and broken stalactites cast long, dark shadows; bits of shattered crystal littered the floor like diamond dust. Something wet and viscous dripped from the ceiling and walls.

And there, nearly as far back as the light reached, Hunk saw it: a twisted creature far larger than the Ziva. It must have been ten feet tall, six large eyes flashing in the light. Like a robeast in miniature, it seemed to be made up of equal parts flesh and machine, metal jutting up through the skin and indicator lights pulsing in time with its breathing.

It turned toward Hunk, who froze, afraid to provoke an attack. Less than a hundred feet separated it from the open door. If it made it out, it could tear through the entire Balmera, slaughtering Balmerans before they even had a chance to fight back.

It screamed again, and the comms finally went silent. Hunk's light, too, flickered out, as did the indicator on the door lock. Hunk cursed, squinting as darkness descended once more on the tunnel, but there was no time for indecision. He activated his bayard, steadied his stance, and opened fire. He may not have been able to aim, but his strength lay in suppressive fire and crowd control, and that worked just as well with or without sight in an area as enclosed as this.

The lasers lit up the tunnel like a strobe light, illuminating the creature as it ran in stop-motion. Forty feet from the door, it skidded to a stop, howling as it registered the pain. Hunk took a step forward, pressing the advantage. The robeast stood its ground, letting out another ear-splitting shriek.

Then it stopped, staring at him, and Hunk swore he saw confusion in its eyes.

Hunk tried to connect to Shay again, but the comms were still down--and his light still wouldn't turn on. He tried his scanners and his shield, but those didn't respond either.

The weird blips they'd seen from orbit must have been coming from this thing--and the effect was even stronger up close. Strong enough to knock out most of his suit's systems from a hundred feet away. The scream was probably the vector, or at least the EMP-like effect happened simultaneously with the screams.

Which meant the last scream had been intended to take his weapon out of commission, and the robeast was confused that it haddn’t worked. The fact that the creature could reason to such an extent curdled Hunk's stomach, but it didn't change the fact that the Balmerans here were largely helpless. If Hunk didn't stop this thing, he would be responsible for any deaths that followed.

So he pressed forward, forcing the robeast back as its confusion turned to fear. It was intelligent, but it was still a hunter, and it seemed not to know how to deal with something that was immune to its ability. The farther they got from the door, the bolder it became, lunging at him, taking swipes with it's six-inch claws. It raked deep gashes into Hunk's armor and once almost knocked him off his feet, but he scrambled up, opening fire again before the creature could make a break for the exit.

His finger ached from holding the trigger--the lasers being his only source of light in here besides the barely-there glow of broken crystals and the strange yellow blobs on the wall. His shots didn't seem to be doing much to hurt the creature. It shied away from them, and they left dark scorches on the creature's skin, but his finger would fall off before he did enough damage to put it down.

Fortunately, they were nearing the narrowest part of the tunnel. Hunk sensed Klex and her two teams waiting on either side of him just up ahead. A little longer, and they would have it in their sights. Hunk roared as the creature tried one last charge, his knees shaking as he played chicken with something more than twice his size.

The creature flinched first, turning and fleeing down the tunnel toward the open chamber, where it probably intended to get behind him. It would be much harder to track it in an open space, as quick as it was.

Hunk poured everything he had into the song, willing the Balmerans to understand that now was the time to strike.

With a deafening crack, the tunnel collapsed, the robeast pinned between two enormous slabs of stone. It screamed, the sound setting Hunk's teeth on edge, but the tunnel continued to collapse in on itself. Hunk backed away as the ground beneath his feet bucked, and as he stopped firing his bayard, the darkness swarmed back in, but only for a moment.

A whole section of the tunnel wall collapsed, opening a gap to the tunnel beyond, where Klex stood at the center of a line of Balmerans, all of whom had their hands pressed to the wall. The glow of Quintessence, and of the crystals surrounding them, traced the outlines of the cave where Hunk stood. He waited, holding his breath, as the robeast continued to struggle.

Then, slowly, the motion subsided. Hunk's light flickered back on, and he breathed a sigh of relief.

It was done.

* * *

Nyma dropped down onto the couch, heaving a sigh that garnered only a fleeting glance from Val before she returned her gaze to that damn book of hers.

"Everything okay?" Val asked, turning a page.

Nyma shrugged. "I guess."

Val hummed vaguely and lifted her arm enough to open a space for Nyma on her lap. Nyma eyed the tacit offering with distrust. Val had spent every spare moment reading, even bringing one or both of her Oriande books to meals. If they weren't training or on a mission, Val probably had her nose stuck in a book, or else she was talking Quintessence theory with one of the Holts. Or Ryner. Or Coran, or Hunk, or Shay. Hell, seemed like everyone knew something about Quintessence these days except Nyma. With Keith and Lance gone back to the homeworld and Shiro busy with coalition business, Nyma could hardly find someone to talk to who _didn't_ want to toss around ideas for how to wrap the universe around their little finger. Nyma knew that if she let herself get tricked into staying while Val was reading that book, they'd wind up treading the same old headache-inducing paths.

...But she did kind of want the cuddles.

With a huff, Nyma scooted over and draped herself across Val's lap, her head pillowed on Val's stomach. Val wrapped one arm around her shoulders, the other--still holding the book--propped up on the back of the couch. Nyma eyed the book suspiciously.

"Find anything useful in there?"

"Not yet," Val said. "But I think I'm starting to understand some of the theory behind Quintessence a little better. Like I was reading the other day about wormholes. You know how spacetime bends around gravity... or something like that. I'm not the physicist in the family. But apparently Quintessence can do the same thing, but with more control. I've always heard wormholes described as, like, tunneling through the folds of spacetime to make the distance shorter. What Quintessence does is act sort of like a pair of magnets. You're one, and you drop the other one where you put your Quintessence. If you're strong enough, the two points will be drawn together, and for a second they'll actually touch. Boom, wormhole. Or whatever other effect you're going for. Ryner thinks my bilocation does the same thing, except instead of opening a portal, I make the space around me overlap with another region of space for a split second, so I’m standing in two places at once. There’s still just one of me at that point, but when I let go, I get sort of… split down the middle. The extra me can draw on the pool of Quintessence left behind to keep running for a little while, independently of Me Prime."

Nyma stared up at her, a touch of exasperation coloring her mood. "If you say so." She closed her eyes and settled in for a nap as Val went back to reading, but sleep was elusive today.

She and Val had gone to Coran with the Delegate's message, Val brimming with optimism, Nyma a little more jaded. Coran hadn't had an immediate answer to any of their questions, not that Nyma had expected him to. If there were any clues to the Delegate's identity in the message, it would take time to find them, and Pidge and Meri were both already working overtime to find any details on Vindication on account of Sam's involvement. Didn’t matter one way or another if Rolo was there, too, when you thought about it.

Coran thought she should tell Pidge. Nyma was pretty sure Val agreed with him, but she didn't say anything, which was for the best. Nyma would tell Pidge eventually--soon. She just had to manage her own expectations, first. Odds were the Delegate had been lying from the start. Nyma couldn't go to Pidge under the assumption that Rolo and their dad were actually in the same place; that would only lead to disappointment when they inevitably found one without the other.

Groaning, Nyma turned her face into Val's shirt, willing her mind to shut up about hypotheticals regarding Rolo's current condition and whereabouts. Until someone turned up more information, all she could do was hit prisons one at a time and hope.

Val's hand shifted to Nyma's headtails, and against her better judgment, Nyma melted into the touch. "Hey," Nyma said. "If you bilocated right now, do you think we could do something to get me out of my own head while the other you did all the reading?"

After a moment of no reaction, Val actually looked away from her book, which was more than Nyma had gotten from her so far. She stared down at Nyma, a thoughtful look on her face. "Now that's a thought. It'd probably have to be my prime body doing the reading; stuff from the other one sometimes comes back a little scrambled." She pursed her lips. "I wonder if I could use that. Come at this from a different angle."

Nyma pushed herself up on her elbows. "Wait a minute, hold on. The point of this wasn't to have twice as many of you reading that book!"

"No, of course." Val grabbed her bookmark and stuck it between the pages as she set the book aside. She grabbed Nyma's hand as she started to pull away and kissed the fingers one by one. "Sorry for being so distracted lately."

"It's fine," Nyma grumbled. "It's helping find Rolo and everyone else. I'm not going to complain about that."

Val rolled her eyes. "That doesn't mean I can't take a break to do something fun with you. Hell, Nyma, I bilocated across the entire universe and shirked my training just to hang out with... you..."

"I thought that _was_ your training," Nyma said.

But Val wasn't listening. Her gaze had gone distant, and she cursed suddenly, launching to her feet and pulling Nyma along with her. "Tonight's going to be a date night, I _swear_. No distractions. I just need to talk to Pidge for ten minutes first."

She bit her lip, giving Nyma the most pitiful look she’d ever seen, and Nyma couldn't resist its pull.

"Fine," she said. "Ten minutes."

Val broke into a grin, rising up on her toes to kiss Nyma's cheek. "Thanks, babe. I'll be quick."

* * *

"The run-in with Zarkon at the summit brought it all to the forefront, I guess," Shiro said. He didn't know how long he'd been talking now, spilling out things he'd already shared with Allura, or with Matt--and also some things he'd only been able to share with Black when they were deep in the bond, her calming presence blotting out the worst of his guilt and disgust. He’d been afraid that he wouldn’t be able to make himself talk, but once he started, he found it was quite the opposite. It all came pouring out through the cracks in his control, even the things he sworn never to put on Akira’s shoulders.

Akira listened to it all quietly, though, never pushing, never patronizing. Even as Shiro talked about the people he'd killed in the Arena, the people he'd gotten killed with his early, clumsy attempts at rebellion--through it all, Akira never once showed a flicker of fear or of judgment. There was plenty of anger, yes, and disgust, but it was all directed at Haggar and Zarkon's commanders, and Akira was careful to keep a tight lid on it so he didn't derail Shiro's story.

Shiro’s voice was hoarse by now, but he kept going. There was more to say, always more to say, and part of him was afraid that once he stopped, Akira's careful neutrality would slip.

"We've talked about it," Shiro said. "Black and I, and Allura now, a few times." It was slow going, all three of them still careful of boundaries and afraid to make it too much about themself. But it _did_ help.

 _Talking_ helped. Whether it was talking with Matt about their shared experiences or talking with Lance, when he called, about self care. Scented bath oils, calming playlists, skin care routines--a few months ago, Shiro would have called them frivolous, but in the handful of weeks he'd been back on the castle-ship, Lance had gotten him hooked.

Talking with Akira, though—that eased a tension Shiro had hardly even known he’d been carrying.

"Coran's looking into bringing a therapist or two on board,” Shiro said as he ran out of things to talk about. There would be more, he knew, but he’d run through it all from start to finish, skimming over most of the details for the sake of time. “He's interviewed a few candidates, but nothing's come of them so far."

Akira hummed. "Didn’t Hunk used to do therapy?"

"Maybe? I'm not sure."

Akira was nodding, though, more confident than before. "No, he's definitely mentioned it before. I don't think he liked the councilor at the Garrison, but he had someone back home he'd go see on breaks."

Shiro's brow furrowed, and he stared at the floor. "Do they even work with…?" He trailed off, struggling to put a name to his issues. Alien abduction, mind control, actual gladiatorial combat, cybernetic experimentation... He doubted anyone on Earth had ever seen a case like his.

"Do they work with people who have PTSD, you mean?" Akira suggested gently. "Maybe not, but they probably know someone who does. Maybe someone who's worked with veterans or something. Don't you think someone who understands human psychology is going to be your best bet, at the very least? Nothing against Alteans, but you have to assume that on some level the wiring's a little different."

It was a fair point, and if Shiro's trust in the Garrison hadn't been entirely shattered long before now, he might have even asked Coran to look there. There was always the worry that an enemy of Voltron had infiltrated their allies and would try to put their own agent into consideration.

If they asked Hunk's old therapist for recommendations, though, that risk dropped considerably.

It would mean asking Hunk or his parents for the contact information, though, which would mean admitting the reason behind the question. Shiro reminded himself that Hunk wouldn't judge. No one else had--not Allura, not Matt, not Akira, not Lance. Matt had even said he'd consider making an appointment, too, once they found someone. Hunk, of all people, wouldn't think less of Shiro for seeking help.

That didn't make the tightness in his chest go away.

"I'll ask him," Shiro said, pushing down the anxiety. Saying it out loud made it a promise, which made him more likely to follow through. He knew he needed it, no matter how uncomfortable it was to admit. He fell silent after that, his thoughts swirling around and around, replaying the things he'd said and stewing on the things he'd left unsaid. He hadn’t gone into much detail about the prisons, about the Arena, about any of it. Only enough so Akira would have an inkling why he was so domineering sometimes.

Akira breathed in, then leaned over, slipping his hand into Shiro's and squeezing. "Thank you."

"For what?" Shiro asked, hating the way his voice shook.

"For telling me. I know it wasn't easy."

Shiro shrugged the words away. If Akira knew how much he was still hiding--

Black purred in the back of Shiro's mind, soothing his self-deprecating thoughts. **_Small steps,_ ** she reminded him. He didn't have to unload everything at once. What he'd done today was more than enough, and he should be proud. Black agreed emphatically with Akira on that point.

"Thanks for listening," Shiro said, resisting the urge to make a dark joke. "I know it's not a happy subject, and unfortunately, I don't think it's realistic to expect it to stop being an issue any time soon. I want to apologize in advance for—for getting like that. Trying to make decisions for you to keep you out of danger. It’s not my place, and I _know_ how pissed I’d be if someone told me to stay out of the fight. I’m going to try not to do it again—I swear I will, but I’m not—I don’t know if I--"

Akira squeezed his hand again, gently, but it was enough to silence him.

"You lost a lot in the Arena, Takashi," he said. "They stole a _lot_ from you, including your agency. It's okay if it takes time for you to reach a place where it doesn't feel like you need to cling to control just so it doesn't get ripped away again." He paused. “Or that you need to protect me from suffering the same thing.”

"I don't want to be like that, though." Shiro breathed out a laugh, letting his head fall back against the wall of the training room. "I know it sounds childish, but it's the truth. I don't want to be stuck in this middle ground where I've come far enough to see how my trauma's affecting me but can't get over it."

"You won't be stuck there forever." Akira pressed his shoulder to Shiro's. "I'll help you however I can. Matt and Allura and everyone else will help you, if you want us to. And once you find a therapist, they can help you, too. Probably way more than I can."

Shiro shook his head, leaning more insistently into Akira. "It helps just having you here. More than you know. I used to think that I could never get back the person I was before all this. I still don't think I'll ever be that person again entirely. But I've gotten little pieces back. I'm remembering how to laugh, how to joke about something other than death and dying."

"I'm glad. I want to keep helping, whatever you think will do the most good. If you want me to call you out when you’re being irrational, I'll do that. If you want to talk more like we did today, I’ll do that, too. But only what you want."

Shiro stayed quiet for a few moments, turning it over. He'd thought a lot about this since Black brought the issue to his attention, and even more so since his fight with Akira. "I'm not sure what's going to help. We can try things, but fair warning--I might realize that something I thought would help doesn't. I don't want you to feel like it's a reflection on you."

"I won't," Akira assured him. "We're all figuring this out as we go."

"We really are." Shiro stared at the ceiling. His eyes burned, and a surge of gratitude left him momentarily speechless, but Akira seemed to understand anyway.

He turned and pulled Shiro into a hug. “You’re not alone, Takashi. I’ll always be here for you, no matter what.”

* * *

Once the robeast was dealt with, the fight was no more difficult than the liberation of the Metos and Theros Balmeras. Maybe it was a little more of an uphill climb, since they'd already lost the element of surprise, but a sentry was a sentry, and Hunk had trashed plenty of them in his time. The death of the robeast echoed throughout the Balmera, heartening those who had chosen to fight and inspiring a few more to join the fray.

Hunk and Shay took point, of course. They were the ones with training, with experience. They directed the other Balmerans to where they could do the most good--to sabotage, distract, and scatter. Two teams went to take out the sentry controls while Hunk and Shay drew the Galra’s attention, and once the beacon fell, the battle was essentially over.

There was only a small compliment of Galra soldiers on the Balmera, but they refused to be cowed. Unlike on Metos, this Balmera was not on the verge of death, and as a result its wardens had more stake in maintaining control. They stayed, even when Hunk took to the air, crushing defensive structures and shooting down those few fighters that had made it out before the Balmerans jammed the hangar doors. Shay stayed below, rallying the Balmerans.

By the end of the day, the last dozen Galra had surrendered. The Elders locked them in their own cells, once Hunk had modified the locks to respond to Balmeran biosignatures rather than Galra.

Hunk let himself be dragged into the celebrations, but only for a short time. The robeast corpse still lay where it had fallen, alone in the dark tunnel in an area Yellow's scanners still couldn't penetrate without interference.

"You think there is still danger?" Shay asked, parting ways with the other Elders and joining Hunk in a quieter tunnel off the main gathering.

"I don't know." Hunk fiddled with a multitool he'd grabbed from Yellow's kit. He'd needed it for the cell locks, and there hadn't been time since to go back to Yellow. Besides, it helped to have something to fidget with. "I just don't like it."

Shay hummed, pulling closer to him as they meandered away from the celebration. The song didn't exactly get louder or softer with distance, but it was easier to tune out once the laughter and voices had faded, and soon it was just Shay's curiosity and his own unease threading through the lullaby of the Balmera. (Atsiphos, the Elders had named her, for refusing to be cowed by the Galra and their robeast.)

"There is something more to this than ordinary anxiety," Shay said at last, as the cell block came into view. They continued on past it, opting to go up the side passage Klex had taken, the one where the wall had collapsed into the tunnel.

Hunk checked his scanners again as they neared the opening. His armor's systems didn't go entirely offline like before, but there was static on the comms and spotty readings on the scanners, and he didn't like the shadows that fled from the beam of his wrist-mounted flashlight.

"I don't like anything that interferes with the scanners," he admitted, "considering the last thing that did that turned out to be a Vkullor egg."

Shay's song faltered. "You think that is connected to this creature? That Haggar has begun to implement elements she has engineered from her study of the egg?"

"Maybe?" Hunk ducked through the hole in the wall and picked his way around the rubble to the robeast's arm, which trailed over a broken chunk of rock, reaching out like it was trying to grab Hunk's ankle. He swallowed and stepped carefully around the hand before crouching down and turning his scanners on the corpse. A puddle of the viscous goop lay just beyond the creature’s claws, a luminous yellow in the light of his headlamp. There was a good chance that was what had been hurting the Balmera, so Hunk gave it a wide berth as he knelt to inspect the robeast. "I mean, there was that other robeast back on Maorel, you remember? That one took out our tech, too."

"It is more than that," Shay pointed out. She joined Hunk, staring at her own scanners. "It was able to disrupt your equipment, by design, yet even dead it does not appear on my scans. Not consistently."

It was true, and that put Hunk even more on edge. The robeast wasn't entirely invisible to the scanners--he was able to take thermal and Quintessence scans, though the BLIP-tech scanner’s other modes registered a curious void. The effects seemed to be limited to the corpse itself; Hunk could still see Shay on the scans, even when she leaned over the robeast for her own examination. That was another point against the Vkullor theory, since the egg's aura had extended far enough to conceal the soldier who had taken it and run.

If this _was_ Vkullor tech, Haggar was still in the early prototypes. They had time to stop her.

"Can you go get some vials from the sampling kit in Yellow's cargo bay? I want to take samples back. Try to find a port to download a copy of the programming, too, if I can. We'll probably want to take the whole corpse, or send it to Olkarion maybe, but that's going to take some time to arrange."

Shay nodded. "You will be fine without me?"

"This thing's already dead," Hunk said. "It's creepy as heck, but it can't actually do anything to me." ...It _probably_ couldn't do anything to him. He smiled for Shay anyway. "I'll be fine."

She left, and Hunk turned back to the corpse, beginning his search for a port and trying to pretend he didn't notice the deep shadows and the faint yellow glows that surrounded him.

* * *

Val found Pidge in one of the smaller rooms on the training deck. Unlike the larger, more commonly used rooms, this looked more like a doctor's office--a counter and several chairs to one side, a desk with a medical scanner against the wall. The other half of the room was open, with padding spread out on the floor and bars mounted on the walls. Coran was the only other person present in the room when Val arrived, and he was walking them through their exercises. Pidge was seated on one of the chairs, a resistance band looped around their toes as they flexed.

"Hey," Val called, knocking on the door. It was an effort not to blurt out her idea instantly, but she knew Pidge was taking their physical therapy very seriously, if only to minimize the amount of time they spent confined to the castle. (The current estimate was two more weeks, but Pidge was hoping to shave two or three days off that.) Coran, similarly, was acting as a bit of a task-master, at Pidge's request. He pushed them, and they pushed back, and Val could only trust Coran to know when Pidge was just frustrated and when they were actually in need of a break. "Mind if I interrupt?"

"Please do," Pidge said, flexing once more before sliding their foot out of the band and sitting back in their chair. "Anything's better than this monotony."

Val flashed a smile at Coran as she stole in and claimed the corner of the countertop. Nyma trailed after her, looking equal parts bored and curious, a mix few people could pull off as well as Nyma. Val knew she didn't much care about Quintessence theory or any of that, so it sucked that that was basically Val's life right now.  
  
But Nyma did care about the intent behind it, so obviously she would be interested in Val's breakthrough. (Val hoped it was a breakthrough. She didn't trust her logic entirely, but it seemed reasonable...)

Coran pulled the other chair over beside Pidge's and sat, his eyes darting to the book in Val's lap. " _Quintessence Theory,_ " he said. "You've found something, then?"

"Maybe." Val ran her thumb along the edges of the pages, excess energy setting her foot to jangling. "I've been reading about the effect Quintessence has on spacetime, right? And talking with Ryner about how that plays into my bilocation."

Pidge accepted the water packet Coran offered and eyed Val. "You still think that's the answer?"

Val shut her mouth with a click. She knew Pidge was hoping for something more direct. A way to pull their dad out of whichever prison he was being held in, or at least a way to get them in. Val couldn't carry other people with her when she bilocated, so Pidge had mostly turned their attention to other possibilities. "I don't know. That doesn't matter, anyway. More... Range is our main limiting factor right now, no matter what it is we're trying, right?"

"Right," Pidge said. "Almost everything I've looked at requires exponentially more Quintessence to cover a larger distance. Even if you get incredibly efficient at what you're doing, you're still going to run out of Quintessence eventually."

Val nodded. "But I was able to use my magic over an incredible distance when I bilocated into the Blue Lion."

"I thought we agreed that was an exception. The paladin bond is made of pure Quintessence, and you left a piece of yourself in Blue anyway, so the distance was irrelevant."

Val folded her hands and pointed both index fingers at Pidge. "Yes and no. That's what I wanted to talk to you about, actually. I had a thought. Two thoughts. I might be way off base here, but that's why I'm workshopping it. Stop me if this sounds completely impossible." She breathed in, willing her fluttering heart to calm down. "So at least with bilocation, there are two main components. First you have to create a connection between two points in space so you exist both places at once, and then you let it go and use Quintessence to maintain two separate bodies."

Pidge nodded. "Go on..."

"So, the second half of that, first of all. I've never been able to maintain the projection outside of Blue. I thought that was because the distance didn't exist for me when I was in her, like you said. But I think I was actually drawing on Blue's Quintessence. Like, I stretched so far I couldn't place any of my own Quintessence, so that body was entirely dependent on Blue to exist."

"But..." Pidge leaned forward, frowning. "I thought you couldn't use someone else's Quintessence."

"It's difficult," Coran said, before Val could second-guess herself too much. "In most cases, you can't. Not directly." He stroked his mustache. "It's possible that the paladin bond could get around that, I suppose. It is essentially a sharing of Quintessence."

Pidge stared at him. "So we can use the lions to boost our range? Why didn't you say something sooner?"

Coran held up his hands, his gaze immediately snapping back into focus. "It's not something I've ever really thought about, to be perfectly honest. I'll have to look into it more. But it sounds plausible. _Not_ that it solves all your problems," he added quickly. "Even the lions can't reach across the entire universe. You can broaden your search, perhaps, but not indefinitely."

Val had begun to relax at the confirmation that her ideas weren't totally off base, but she tensed up again, her heart hammering in her throat. "That's where my other thought comes in."

Pidge swiveled, eyes wide.

"Even if we assume that I used Blue's Quintessence to maintain my second body in her cockpit," Val said slowly, "that doesn't explain how I got there in the first place. The way bilocation works, it shouldn't have happened at all if I couldn't reach my destination. Having a piece of me there already doesn't completely explain it away. Like you said, even Blue has a limit. She can't stay in touch with me at all times all the way across the universe, so I couldn't have been pulling on her Quintessence then, and my Quintessence definitely couldn't reach there on its own."

"But part of you already was there," Nyma said, sounding frustrated. "I thought we'd already established this."

Val turned, gripping the edge of the countertop. "Exactly. But it's not literally _me_ , is it? I can't control it. It's not like Blue has a little mini-Val running around inside her head. At least, I don't think so..."

An amused ripple in her mind told her, first of all, that Blue had been listening in on this conversation, and secondly, that Val was right in her assumption. There was a little bit of Val's Quintessence in Blue, and a little bit of Blue's in her; that was the nature of the paladin bond. But it was nothing more than that.

Bolstered, Val nodded. "So what that tells me is... I need to have two anchor points, yeah? Two magnets to pull spacetime together to create the confluence, or whatever. But the second magnet doesn't need to be something I create. It doesn't even need to be actively involved in the effort. It’s not about whether or not I was able to _reach_ the piece of me inside Blue. It was a matter of whether or not I was able to _recognize it_ across that distance." She searched the other faces in the room, her mouth dry. "Right?"

Pidge glanced at Coran, seemingly waiting on his ruling. They all knew what Val's suggestion implied—if she was right, they didn’t need to find Sam Holt, Rolo, or Rax at all. They just had to figure out how Val had recognized Blue, or the part of herself that resided in Blue, from a distance--then use that same principle to make their missing family members her other anchor point.

"Perhaps," Coran finally said. "I honestly can't be any more certain than that. It's not something anyone's ever studied, so far as I know. If the paladin bond is the root of it, or makes it easier, then even more so. Keturah studied Pygnarat magic with Alfor, but she was like Matt--and there was no reason for her to try to bring down fire on the Red Lion from a galaxy away. You would be the first to have made a connection like this."

Val's breath stalled. _You will be the first to accomplish what you’re trying to do._ That was what Sage Ellorn had told her—and, okay, maybe she was grasping at straws, but she couldn't help feeling like she was on the right track with this.

"I'll tell Matt and Ryner to look into it," Pidge said. "If this pans out..."

The comm on the wall buzzed, and Zelka's voice came on. "Coran?"

"I'm here."

"The yellow paladins have returned," Zelka said. "They are requesting you meet them in the hangar, if you're available."

Pidge glanced at Coran, frowning. "That doesn't sound good."

"They requested your presence as well, Paladin Pidge. As well as Paladins Matt and Ryner. I don't suppose they're with you."

"No, but I can pass the message along," Coran said. "Thank you, Zelka."

Val hopped off the counter as Coran ended the call and called down to Green's hangar. She wanted very much to know what had happened with Hunk and Shay, but a look at Nyma told her it would have to wait. Val had promised a date, after all. And it wasn't like she'd be much help with whatever science stuff the others were needed for.

"I'll keep looking into that idea," Val said to Pidge. "You guys can get on it whenever you get the chance. No more rush than usual."

Pidge nodded once, grabbing their ankle brace from the floor beside their chair and fastening the straps. Then they were up and out the door--slower than usual, but walking without assistance. Val watched them go, then turned and offered her hand to Nyma.

"I believe I promised you a date night."

* * *

"It's definitely biological in origin," Coran said.

"You think?" Pidge hunched over their computer, typing out few more commands. "I've barely cracked the surface of this code, and I can already tell you there's a _lot_ in here."

Matt hovered at Coran's shoulder, watching as the results of several more scans popped up. He recognized some of them--a DNA analysis, comparing the sample to known species; chemical composition readouts for several different samples. Once, he might even have been able to make sense of the results. He'd majored in biomechanical engineering, and had conducted his share of research. Even been published a few times. The castle ran different tests than Matt was used to, but he should have been able to glean something from all this data.

Instead, he was left floundering, barely parsing what Coran said. He'd had plenty of opportunity to flex his muscles as an engineer since escaping the Empire, but as a biologist? To say he was rusty was a gross understatement.

"The instruments don't lie," Coran said, pinching a screen between two fingers and swiping it over to Pidge's display. "These samples are invisible on certain scans, and there's nothing synthetic about them."

"Is it the Vkullor egg?" Hunk asked. He'd spent the last three hours hovering over Pidge's shoulder, watching as they dug into the data. "You think Haggar's reverse engineered its cloaking abilities?"

Coran frowned. "Impossible to say. The database doesn't contain any Vkullor genetic material."

"But it makes sense," Hunk said. He turned to Matt. "Right? We know Haggar has it, we know she's gotta be trying to do something with it."

"It's clunky, if it is Vkullor genetics." Pidge leaned back in their chair, scowling at Coran's data. "Those measurements you sent? They're nowhere near what we saw with the egg. That thing blocked _all_ our scanners, perfectly. This is more... glitching and intermittent interference."

"Precisely." Coran dropped into a chair, his fingers digging furrows in his hair. "Something about this doesn't feel right."

"What do you mean?" Matt asked.

"I'm not sure." Coran glanced at Ryner, who shook her head.

"We'll bring the body back," she said. "Run some more tests."

Coran nodded, but he seemed distracted, and Matt couldn't help the unease that bubbled up inside him. Vkullor or otherwise, he didn't like the idea of Haggar being able to hide robeasts in plain sight.

More tests, that was what they needed. Just like Ryner said. Once they knew more, they could make a plan.

In the mean time, all they could do was keep digging.


	34. The Interrogation Room

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Meri made it to Haggar's flagship, the _Eryth_ , under the guise of Reza ve Orahk, a druid trainee seeking to join Haggar's circle. Haggar welcomed her--on the condition that she prove herself by undertaking a test of Haggar's choosing. Meanwhile Keith, Lance and Thace returned to the homeworld but were separated when Arel's brother Vit ambushed them. Pidge is still recovering from the ankle they dislocated during the fight with the Green Lion robeast that, unbeknownst to them, is piloted by their own father.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: The test Haggar sets for Meri is potentially disturbing, though nothing is shown on screen. If psychological torture, threats of physical harm, and morally gray actions are not your cup of tea, I'd recommend reading the summary at the end of the chapter and/or skipping that scene. (Stop reading at "She couldn't do this," and skip down to the next scene, which starts with, "Pidge stared at the words..." Later, stop reading again at "Meri was going to be sick" and jump back in with, "Haggar was still watching her.")

Pidge's legs were bouncing, heels tapping frantically against the floor. They had different passages of Val's books pulled up on screens all around them, eyes darting from one to another as they tried to pull together some kind of coherent theory. Val was running with her plan to try to project outward from the Blue Lion, but had met with no success so far, so Pidge had turned their attention to other questions.

Well. To the second half of the question, at least. They'd pulled up every reference they could find to Quintessential tagging. That was their term for it, anyway, since there didn't seem to be a lot of focus on how someone using Quintessence identified a target. It took many forms--selecting a destination for teleportation or bilocation, identifying the recipient for telepathy, maintaining an empathetic bond with someone across a distance...

In all cases, it was the same: the books said it was typical for line-of-sight to be a core requirement for the abilities to function, then went on to mention all these exceptions without providing anything more than some shallow speculation on the determining factors. "Familiarity" came up a lot, but what did that _mean_? If Pidge could find and learn a useful ability, would they automatically be able to target their dad because he was a familiar presence? Could you establish familiarity second-hand? If it was memory-based, the mind-meld could help, but if it was an actual, physical (or metaphysical) connection, it might require personal contact, in which case Pidge couldn't see how Val would ever be able to target Pidge's dad.

Something smacked against Pidge's forehead, startling them out of their thoughts. They glanced down to see a piece of notebook paper, folded into a triangle, lying on the desk before them.

"Sorry," Val said, casually creasing another page into an identical paper football. "I'm out of practice. My aim is _terrible_."

Pidge scowled at her, rubbing their forehead. "What were you trying to hit?"

Val nodded at an empty water bottle sitting on the far end of the desk. It was a reasonable excuse, and Val's next paper football only missed by a couple inches, but the way they were sitting, the paper would have had to hit a pretty extreme cross-breeze to hit Pidge by accident.

"Right..." They turned back to their work, slowly forgetting Val's presence.

Until a wadded up ball of paper hit them in the side of the head.

Pidge slapped their hand down as it bounced away, smashing it against the desktop, and leveled Val with a glare.

Val answered with a nonplussed smile. "Whoops."

"I'm trying to focus."

"You've been focusing for hours," Val said. "With no breaks."

Pidge hunched their shoulders. "I can't afford to take a break. As long as I'm stuck here with a busted ankle, I need to at least try to do something useful."

"You have been doing useful things, Pidge," Val said. "You've dug up intel for the Guard, and you've helped Coran tear apart that freaky-ass robeast. And we've made a hell of a lot of progress figuring out the underpinnings of Quintessence. It's okay to let yourself take a breather every now and then."

"I can't stop yet!" Pidge cried. "We've figured out a little bit of how the robeast was built, but we still can't be sure that it was Vkullor genes that did it, and I don’t know if you’ve heard, but killing it didn’t undo the damage it did to the Balmera. It poisoned it or something, and now everything’s getting worse and no one can stop it! And, oh yeah, we still have no clue how we're going to find my dad."

"I wouldn't say no clue." Val leaned back in her seat, holding up her hands as Pidge's expression darkened. "I know it's frustrating, Pidge. But you can't be working at full power right now. Tell me you aren't a little foggy after hammering away at the same problem all day."

Pidge slouched down in their seat, crossing their arms over their chest. Val's accusation hit close to home, but they didn't want to admit it. The thing was, they were still grounded, and there were only so many priority projects for them to bounce between. They'd tried to take a day to work on Rover, but they couldn't focus without the nagging guilt dragging their mind back to their dad and Rolo and Rax. Just about the only distraction they'd had was working on Green, and Ryner had finished the last of the repairs two days ago.

Now it was just Pidge, these books, and a mounting frustration at being grounded for nearly three weeks. So they kept beating their head against a wall, even as they felt themself losing their sharpness.

Val rolled her eyes. "You're meeting up with Coran again later, right?"

"Couple hours from now, yeah. Today's the day I find out if I can go back to fieldwork, or if I'm stuck on the castle-ship for another two weeks."

"So it's like a medical Groundhog Day," Val said, grimacing. "Fun."

"You're telling me."

Val snapped her notebook shut and stood. "Okay. So here's what's going to happen. We're going to help you relax and shut off your brain until the appointment with Coran. That way if it's bad news and you need to throw yourself into research to feel better about being stuck here, you'll at least have a clear head. You can bounce ideas off me if you need to, or rant, or whatever. And if it's good news, even better!"

Pidge hesitated, their eyes drawn back to the screens glowing all around them. They had been overworking themself; they knew that. Usually by now Matt would have dragged them away from the computer, but Matt was off with Shiro and Allura responding to a distress signal from one of their allies.

They eyed Val. "When you say 'relax and shut off my brain,' what do you mean, exactly?"

"Video games?" Val suggested. "You can pick."

Pidge resisted for only another couple of seconds; the siren song of video games was just too strong. They'd gotten some good use out of the various consoles the paladins had brought along from Earth, though with Lance and Matt, their two main gaming partners, both out of the castle for months, that had kind of tapered off.

Val was grinning, though--she knew as well as Pidge did that they couldn't say no to an offer of video games.

As distractions went, it was top quality, even if Val was no match for Pidge. She was a good sport about it, and her gung-ho approach to first person shooters was more entertaining than stiff competition would have been, anyway. By the time their appointment with Coran rolled around, they were in stitches, and there was a spring in their step as they headed down to the med bay with Val.

The examination was quick and painless, at least. Coran had supervised all of Pidge's physical therapy anyway, so he knew where they were at. They were still working up to the sharp turns and agile footwork their usual fighting style depended on, and Coran kept reminding them that pushing too hard ran the risk of re-injury. But he did okay them taking off the brace, _finally._

"You still have at least a week or two before I'd be comfortable sending you on a ground mission," Coran said, closing out of the latest scans.

Pidge leaned forward, their stomach doing flips. "But...?"

He sighed. "But you should be fine so long as you stay in the Green Lion--and are _careful_ ," he added, putting entirely too much emphasis on the last word.

"I will be," they said. "I promise. I can go flying now?"

Coran shook his head fondly and waved them toward the door. "Go on. But make sure you take Ryner if you're going to be gone too long."

But Pidge was already gone.

* * *

"Come on, Keith, where are you?"

Lance lifted his head from his rifle's scope, scanning the street below for signs of a familiar purple mullet. It had been almost six hours since the skirmish with Vit--Arel's brother, apparently, and suddenly Lance had a new appreciation for Arel's sparkling personality. None of them had been hurt in the fighting, but after fighting for their lives on what should have been friendly turf, they didn't want to take any chances. They'd holed up, opting to wait for Keith to come to them rather than mounting a search.

It was more than just adrenaline that made the city seem unfriendly, though. The streets were quieter than usual, Galra opting to stay indoors rather than roam around. It was broad daylight by now, and sure, there had been an hour or so of activity as people hurried to work or made their way home. After that, though, it had quieted down, and Lance only occasionally spotted someone on the streets, usually with their head down and their steps just a fraction shy of an all-out sprint.

It reminded him of Olkarion, after the fighting had begun. The locals knew something was happening, or was about to happen, and they didn't want to get caught up in it.

Considering Vit was part of the something going on, Lance couldn't blame them. He didn't want to get caught up in all that, either.

"Anything yet?" Arel asked, creeping up behind Lance's post at the window. They'd headed first for the apartment they'd rented in the city, but the Empire hadn't even tried all that hard to hide the fact that it was being watched. Small surprise, considering they'd found the resistance, too. Thace had led them, instead, to the vacant office building that had been their first haven in the 301. They'd stayed here only a week, so Vit's buddies probably wouldn't bother posting a guard, if they even knew about it.

They just had to hope Keith would think to come here once he realized the apartment was out of the question.

Assuming he spotted the watchers posted out front in their shoddy food cart disguise.

Lance sighed, doing another sweep of the area. "Nothing yet. I'm sure he's fine."

Arel grumbled a bit at that--he'd made it very clear that he wasn't _worried_ about Keith, who, after all, had made his own decision to fight Vit one-on-one. He just wanted to be sure that if Keith _did_ show up, he wasn't bringing trouble on his tail.

(And Lance was out here watching for Santa Claus.)

"It's been hours," Lance called over his shoulder. Thace had taken over the rickety desk that was this room's only piece of furniture. Lance wasn't sure what, exactly, he was doing, but he surmised it involved trying to get a handle on the situation in the 301. "How much longer do we wait before we call?"

Thace didn't immediately respond with an admonition to be patient, as he'd done the last three times Lance had asked, so that was an improvement. Thace was reluctant to use the comms, since none of them knew what kind of precautions the Empire had taken. Posting guards, setting ambushes, going after the resistance--it all spoke to a concerted effort to quell rebellion on the homeworld. Thace said odds were good that they were also monitoring transmissions within the city, and until they could prove otherwise, they had to assume that the enemy was listening in on their calls, if not tracing them back to the source.

"One message," Thace said. "In code, and directing Keith to a third location. We'll have to leave as soon as we send it."

Sounded like an awful lot of paranoia for an awfully small chance that anything would happen, but Thace was the one with experience in covert operations. As long as he was making an effort to get in touch with Keith, Lance wasn't going to argue.

Besides, if Lance knew Thace at all, then the man was at least as worried about Keith as Lance was.

"Okay." Lance lifted his rifle off the windowsill and joined Thace at the desk. "Let's do this."

* * *

The next time they came for Sam, he was ready.

As ready as he'd ever be.

Rolo gave his arm a squeeze, but didn't try to hold him back. They locked eyes, and the roiling in Sam's stomach settled a little bit. He'd talked it over with Rolo time and again over the last few weeks. They'd given Sam a bit of a respite, but had instead poured all their attention into Rolo. (The robeast they were building for him wasn't done yet, but it progressed each time Rolo caught a glimpse of it, so they both knew it was only a matter of time.)

But they weren't helpless. That was the most important thing to remember. The druids could hook them up to robeasts, use their Quintessence to make it more than an ordinary robeast, but they hadn't been able to stop Sam from fighting back. He'd retained his mind when they sent him out to fight Pidge--that was the worst part, but he would stomach the pain and the guilt if it meant he had a chance to change things.

 _Don't try to fight the robeast itself_ , Sam had told Rolo. _They warded it against me somehow. I kept trying to find a weakness, but there was nothing._

_Then... What can we do?_

_Reach out to the paladins... the machines around you, if there are any. They didn't take away the technopathy, just shielded the robeast. I was able to--to interface with the Green Lion. It wasn't quite like digging through the druids' computers; I think she knew I was there. I think she could have kept me out if she wanted to. But she didn't._

That was what he had to remember. He couldn't stop the fight, but if he could give Pidge information.... He'd found the coordinates of this base once before, in his exploration with Rolo. He wasn't sure he remembered them perfectly--there was no way to record them, and he hadn't thought about it in so long--but if he could pass them along... If he could bring Pidge close enough...

This wasn't hopeless.

Pidge and the other green paladin were capable people. The robeast hadn't been able to kill them when it caught them off guard; Sam had to trust that they would fare even better now that they knew it was a threat. And meanwhile, the druids had handed him an opportunity. He just needed to keep his head long enough to take advantage of it.

He didn't resist as they pulled him along, treading familiar corridors to the lab where they'd hooked him up to his robeast. There were more guards than usual this time--probably wary of another outburst like the one that had followed his last visit to this room.

Sam tried to look defeated, resigned. He couldn't afford to provoke the guards by resisting, but he worried that compliance might make them suspicious. He didn't know if they could stop him from reaching out to the paladins, but he didn't want to give them reason to try.

When they got to the room, though, they didn't take him to the coffin-like chamber that connected to the robeast. The druids instead waited by an exam table, and Sam finally dug in his heels as they shoved him toward it. Panic rose in his chest--panic for the unknown, panic for the gleaming silver device that waited on a tray beside the table.

He fought, but it quickly became clear why they'd sent so many guards. They forced him down onto the table, face-first, pinning his arms and legs and then forcing his head down until he could only move his fingers. The druids moved like shifting shadows, glimpsed out of the corner of his eye.

Fingers brushed against the back of his neck, pulling down the collar of his shirt, and Sam drew in a sharp breath.

A pinch.

And blackness.

* * *

"Dark Green?" Ryner asked, curiosity plucking at the bond.

Pidge hummed contentedly, irrationally pleased just to be back here, in Green, flying through open space. (Not that they hadn't dipped into the bond while helping Ryner patch Green up, but that was different.) "We have to call it something." Pidge shrugged. "Not gonna lie, I was gonna call it the Chartreuse Lion, because I mean, seriously, Chartreuse will never be scary." As Pidge had expected, they got no response from Ryner. When your joke was based on a funny-sounding word, it tended not to translate well. "Oh! I know! The Pistachio Lion!"

Ryner laughed, shaking her head. "I have no idea what that is."

"Exactly!" Pidge threw their hands up, flopping back in their seat. "I try to be clever, but I can only be clever in English. So Dark Green it is. It's short, it's relatively straight forward--right? The translator picks up on the connotation of that, doesn't it?"

"It does," Ryner said. "And I suppose you're right. It's cumbersome to call it the Green Lion robeast--especially given the dubiousness of that designation."

Pidge bobbed their head in agreement. They'd been talking about it on and off for the last three weeks, but the question had come to the forefront as they took Green for a spin. They'd been assuming that the thing they'd run into was a robeast, because what else was that big, that smart, and that artificial?

It was a careless assumption, though. A lion, even a false one, outclassed regular robeasts by a mile. Hell, they'd encountered actual Lion-esque robeasts before. Or, well, Keith and Matt had, back on Merka when they'd first copiloted. One actual lion had been enough to take out two of the robeasts then, so Haggar had clearly stepped up her game in the months since. It would be better, in the long run, not to assume they knew what they were up against just because Dark Green bore a passing resemblance to a robeast.

That was why they were headed back to Renxora, actually. One of the reasons. Pidge was also hoping to find more information on their dad that they'd overlooked in their last search. They hadn't said anything out loud, but Ryner picked up on it anyway.

All too soon, they were in the air over the asteroid, which looked considerably worse-for-wear since the battle. Pidge had been high on adrenaline and pain when they left, so they hadn't gotten a good view of the aftermath, and their first look now chilled them to the core.

"We were lucky," Ryner said, sensing Pidge's thoughts. "We're not going to take any chances this time."

"I'll stay here," Pidge said with a sigh. They'd promised Coran exactly that when he cleared them to fly, anyway, and truth be told they weren't crazy about going back into the place where they'd almost died. They flushed as Ryner extended sympathy through the bond, but set down near the base and whistled for Rover. "I'll keep Rover's feed up so I don't miss anything. I can use him to hack into anything that still has security running, too."

Ryner nodded. "I'll let you know if I need it. Make sure you keep your eyes on the sky. I doubt the... Dark Green will return, but I don't want to count on that assumption."

Pidge saluted, and she hurried out of the lion and into the base, Rover trailing after her. Pidge watched them disappear inside before taking off, settling in on a large asteroid some way away and bringing up all the scans. The area was completely silent at the moment, so Pidge left Green to monitor the scanners while they turned their attention to Rover's feed.

Ryner was already deep into the wreckage, clambering over heaps of rubble and sending Rover through smaller gaps to check out areas that had been blocked off in the collapse. The upper floors had been completely leveled in the battle, but that was the one area Pidge and Ryner hadn't explored at all the first time around. Anything that may have been there had likely already been demolished, but it was worth checking anyway.

They found nothing, though. A number of crushed sentries. A few more cannisters of liquid Quintessence, most of which had spilled on the floor. It had evaporated in the vacuum by now, but the floor still glowed on Rover's scanners, residual Quintessence having leeched into the concrete and carpets.

"This whole area was a sham," Ryner said, her voice hushed in the oppressive silence of the base. "I don't think there was anything left up here at all."

"Just enough to trick the BLIP-tech scanner," Pidge agreed, grimacing. "I don't suppose there's anything that might give us insight into Dark Green's construction or capabilities?"

Ryner hummed. "It doesn't seem so. Nothing we haven't already figured out, at any rate."

Pidge wrinkled their nose, but they weren't surprised. The other lion had hit too quick and too hard to leave many traces behind, and Green hadn't done nearly enough damage to dislodge pieces of her opponent.

Ryner continued on, plunging deeper into the base. She moved carefully, checking the rooms they'd overlooked before, now that the pressure to be fast and silent had lifted. It was a long, slow process, and Pidge kept going back to the scanners to check on anomalies--innocent anomalies, every time, but they dutifully reported them to Ryner, then relocated Green to another asteroid, just in case. After the second time, they added the cloak as another layer of protection.

It ran out before Ryner was done, and Pidge had taken to stimming with a loose thread on the seat cushion to keep from snapping under the pressure. They either wanted to be in there with Ryner, doing something actually productive, or they wanted her to be back here so they could leave.

They hadn't expected coming back here to leave them feeling so queasy.

An hour into the expedition, Ryner finally reached the eighteenth subfloor, where they'd found the computer with the video of Pidge's dad. Pidge screwed their eyes shut, then ran another scan of the area, just to be sure.

"So that was a colossal waste of time," they said. "Ready for me to come pick you up?"

"In a moment." Ryner kept walking, Rover hesitating a moment before following after her. "As long as I'm here, I might as well collect the hard drive."

"Why?" Pidge asked. "I already checked, and they scrubbed it. Hell, they might have put in an entirely new one just to be absolutely sure there was no way we could recover any files."

"Perhaps," Ryner said, "but even if that's true, there might be more information in that video than we had time to notice."

Pidge's mouth ran dry. "You think?"

"I think it's suspicious that they would taunt us with that file, just to have their lion show up to ambush us before we could even process what we'd seen."

That... made sense. It was a long shot, to be sure, but there was just enough sense to Ryner's suggestion that Pidge couldn't dismiss it out of hand. And it wasn't like they were getting anything else out of this place.

So they said nothing as Ryner entered the room and crossed to the lone computer terminal in the center of the dark space. A perverse sort of curiosity kept drawing their eyes back to Rover's feed, despite their resolve not to watch. (They'd already seen the video; they didn't need to relive it.)

Ryner's breathing changed. That was all. No words, no gasp. Just a slight pause between inhale and exhale--but it seized Pidge's attention and chased away all hope of ignoring what she was doing.

"What?" they asked.

"The files," Ryner said. "They're different than before."

" _What?_ "

Ryner nodded, sitting at the computer. "The video from before isn't on here. Just a text file."

"What's in it?"

Rover bobbed in the air, making the image of the display screen blur as Ryner opened the file. Pidge held their breath, waiting for Ryner's pronouncement.

"It's... a message," Ryner said. "The Green Lion of Zarkon awaits you on Aebora. Come alone if you wish to know the fate of the human prisoner."

* * *

"Code Red. Repeat, Code Red. Rendezvous at Jekarna's."

Keith stopped in the shadow of a dome support beacon and pressed a hand to his ear. "Thace?" he asked, then cursed. Right. Three weeks on the castle-ship had ruined his routines. "Cipher?"

There was no response, just a beat of silence before Thace's voice returned. It repeated the same message twice more before falling silent all together, and Keith cursed again as the line went dead. He tried to hail the others--as he'd been doing for the last several hours, but with no response. He'd thought, at first, that they'd been captured, if not outright killed, but he clung to the fact that Thace and Lance were experts at what they did. Between the two of them, they were sure to have outwitted anything the Empire may have thrown at them.

His next thought, then, was communications failure. Maybe Vit was jamming transmissions that didn't use sanctioned channels. Wasn't like Keith had any way to check that from the streets. So he kept moving, wishing he'd thought to arrange to meet his friends somewhere in particular.

It wasn't until he saw the heat on their apartment building that he stopped to think that people might be looking for them. Vit hadn't seemed surprised to find Keith and Arel at the warehouse, which probably meant he'd had eyes inside the resistance. Or far better surveillance equipment than anyone had given him credit for. Either way, it was best to assume that nothing was secure.

So when Thace's transmission came through, Keith wasn't surprised that it was prerecorded and deliberately cryptic. Thace assumed someone was listening in, and was trying to pass along a message that would be meaningless to any hostile ears.

Which was good news, because Keith didn't know anyone named Jekarna.

He also didn't recall Thace ever designating something as a _Code Red._

Maybe that _was_ the code. Never mind the supposed rendezvous at "Jekarna's;" Thace could be telling him to go to where they'd stashed the speeder they'd taken from Red to the 301. Or to Red herself. That had been his first instinct, but it seemed less likely, considering she was hidden in a cave several hours outside the city. Or Keith could be completely missing the actual code.

He hesitated for a moment, then changed course. Wasn't like he had any better ideas. He'd been wandering around the city for hours now, not daring to stop for fear that Vit or his lackeys would catch up to him. His feet ached, but it wasn't just the deep ache that came from being on the move for hours. A sharper pain lanced through his heels with each step, forcing him onto his toes. Electrical burns, maybe, courtesy of Vit's spear.

The city remained quiet as it had for most of the day, and Keith kept to narrow alleys and back streets as he cut across downtown toward the industrial district near the edge of the dome where they'd hidden the shuttle.

It occurred to him that Thace's message itself might be a trap. If he'd been captured, or if the druids had a way to mimic voices--old recordings of him from his time as one of Prorok's Lieutenant Commanders, maybe--Vit might be waiting for him at the decrepit old shed they'd claimed as storage, or he might be following Keith in hopes of finding the Red Lion.

It was a risk he had to take.

He slowed as he approached the shed, his sword in one hand, his mother's knife in the other. He circled the block, holographic mask in place, and checked for any suspicious figures, cameras, or other signs of surveillance. Only once he'd satisfied his paranoia did he venture closer, every nerve itching for a fight.

The door to the shed opened when he was still fifty feet away, and Lance burst out, racing across the empty lot toward Keith. Relief stopped him in his tracks, and he sheathed his weapons before Lance impaled himself on them.

"Keith!" Lance called--voice low, but undeniably shaky as he crashed into Keith, his arms locking around his neck. "What the hell, man. You had us worried."

"Sorry," Keith said, steadying Lance (and himself) with a hand on either side of Lance's waist. "You all made it out okay?"

"Easy peasy. We've just been waiting for you."

A short, sharp whistle from the shed put a halt to the conversation, and Lance pulled back, tugging Keith by the wrist toward the open door. Thace and Arel were waiting inside, Arel as stand-offish as ever, Thace keeping a sharp eye on the street outside.

"Did anyone follow you?"

Keith shook his head. "I checked."

"Good. Let's go."

"Go?" Keith tried not to let his disappointment show, but he couldn't help the sharp tone of his question.

Thace turned, frowning at him, and Keith tried not to squirm. "We need to make contact with the resistance and figure out what's happened since we left. Arel is going to lead us to another location--hopefully not one the Empire has yet discovered."

Keith's aching feet protested what was sure to be another long hike across the city, but he kept his mouth shut. He could rest once they were safe, and Thace was right. They needed information now more than anything. He forced a smile when Lance gave him a questioning look, and they set out, Arel in the lead.

Keith just needed to hold out a little while longer.

* * *

Meri wasn't sleeping.

It was a funny thing to dwell on, considering she was set up in a fancy suite on a flagship in the heart of Zarkon's empire. Not just any flagship. _Haggar's_ flagship, the _Eryth_. With Haggar sleeping just around the corner and other druids filling the halls at every hour. With the threat of Haggar's test still looming over her head.

It had been three weeks.

Three weeks of waiting for a death sentence, of looking over her shoulder every ten minutes. The druids gave no overt sign that they were watching her, but Meri wasn't stupid. If they hadn't compelled her into some sort of blood duel or dark magic ritual, it was only because they had found another way to gauge her loyalty.

This _was_ the test.

Not all of it, she was sure. Sooner or later, Haggar was going to put the pressure on, but Meri had to assume that her test had already begun. That she was being watched at every moment, even when she thought she was alone. She had to keep up the act even in the most private of circumstances--all the way down to her quick, cold showers. (It was difficult to be comfortable stripping down, even in a stolen body, when you were constantly, unsettlingly aware of the possibility of hostile eyes tracing your every move.)

It wore at her. The secrecy. The fear. Ulaz's Quintessence injector was designed to be unobtrusive but easy to access: an unremarkable bracer that stored Quintessence and masked its presence, with a crystalline lining on the underside that forced the Quintessence into her system before her body could strip it of incompatible markers. Someone might have noticed the bracer, but she was reasonably sure they hadn't figured out what purpose it served.

The side effects were another question entirely. She spent the first week feeling like she was coming down with a virus, the aches and raging fever making her limited contact with the druids even more torturous. Hard enough to lie to them without her brain running slower than a Lygerian slug.

Worse still were the fluctuations in her Quintessence--blessedly rare, but terrifying when they hit. One woke her from a dead sleep as she felt her shift slipping away. She'd frozen, praying the room was dark enough, or the druids lax enough, that no one had noticed, and fought to get the shift back under control.

She'd been so paranoid ever since that she could hardly sleep for two hours at a time, and the slightest current in the air was enough to wake her and set her heart pounding. The only time the fluctuations came during the day--so far--had been minor; the flaws in her shift had been confined to areas easily covered by her robes. Whatever the druids might sense in her aura was another matter entirely.

But she hadn't been discovered yet.

She repeated those words like a mantra, bolstering her through long, empty days. She had access to the druids' library, ate meals in their commissary, and was given leave to roam the entire flagship except for the labs where the druids did most of their work, but still Meri felt as though she was wasting time. Commander Holt was still out there, suffering in Vindication, and Meri needed to get the clearance to put Ulaz on the team soon. As long as that knowledge weighed on her, she couldn't make herself focus on anything else, even the things that offered her advantages in this infiltration.

She wished Haggar would just show her face. Welcome Meri into the circle or cut her down; either way would be better than staying in this limbo.

Or so she thought.

The druid was waiting for Meri in her private suite after dinner one night. She thought this one called himself Verrok, but it was difficult to tell them all apart. They all had the same lithe build and wore the same masks, and only a handful ever spoke to Meri.

"Reza," he said with a curt nod.

Meri stared back at him, the eerie calm of espionage keeping her pulse steady. "What do you want?"

Verrok's eyes crinkled in amusement behind his mask, and he held out a key card. "Lady Haggar has need of you. Please report to Interrogation Room 2A."

* * *

Ryner couldn't believe she'd let Pidge talk her into this.

"This is a trap," she said, even as the wormhole closed behind them.

Pidge snorted. "Obviously."

"You're still recovering."

Irritation plucked at the bond as Green threw her weight behind Ryner. This was a bad idea, and they all knew it--even Pidge. Not that Pidge would admit that. "I promised Coran I would stay in the lion, and that's exactly what I plan to do. They can't expect us to get out when they've straight-up told us Dark Green's gonna be there."

Pidge didn't need to voice the other thought running through their head.

Sam.

Ryner didn't believe for a second that whoever had left that message would deliver on their promise of information, but it was a lead. It was their only lead. Pidge would never forgive themself if they passed up on a chance to find their dad because they were scared. Even if the chance was exceedingly slim and the danger monumental.

With a sigh, Ryner returned her attention to the scanners, checking for any sign of danger.

...More immediate danger than what they already knew about.

Nothing turned up on the scans, but that didn't necessarily mean they were in the clear. Ryner had looked at the corpse of the robeast Hunk and Shay had fought on Atsiphos. The Empire already had impressive cloaking technology, and they were always working to improve it.

They headed in anyway, Pidge's heart pounding with such ferocious anticipation that Ryner felt her own pulse quicken in sympathy. She was glad, now more than ever, that she'd insisted on calling back to the castle before following the message to this remote planet--a dead planet, looking at the scans.

Pidge hadn't fought her on it, though they had put up a fuss when Karen had threatened to send the entire Guard and all the other paladins after them if anything happened. _And I'll know,_ she'd added, staring Pidge down when they tried to protest.

Karen would be watching now, in whatever way she could, alert for signs that the ambush had been sprung. Ryner understood where she was coming from--both the caution and the reluctant concession to Pidge's zeal. Sam was Karen's husband, after all, and everyone wanted to find him. It was a risk worth taking.

And then there it was. The Dark Green Lion. Waiting alone on a cliff's edge overlooking a rugged valley. It looked like a monument built by some people long dead, the last vestiges of an ancient civilization.

Ryner checked the scans again as Pidge circled the mountain range. Nothing had changed, though. The world was still dead and barren. Not a speck of Quintessence to be found except for that which was contained within Dark Green. It was a brutal world, too, all jagged mountains and barren plains and a ring of volcanoes on the horizon, one of which was erupting even now.

"Nothing?" Pidge asked, frustration making them speak aloud.

Ryner only shook her head. "I don't trust it any more than you do, but it doesn't seem they're going to give us any choice but to approach or give up before we've begun."

"Right," Pidge said. "Down we go, then."

They brought Green back around the mountains, back toward the cliff where Dark Green sat unmoving. It lifted its head as they approached, and Ryner's skin crawled with the sense of something intelligent watching her from behind those magenta eyes. Pidge's hands faltered on the controls, and they stalled in midair, hovering some distance above the ground.

Ryner closed her eyes, focusing on her breathing for a moment to chase away the anxiety, and Pidge drew on her strength. Green purred, further settling them, and they finally set down, close enough that any ambush that tried to hit the Green Lion stood an even chance of hitting Dark Green, as well.

Silence descended on the mountains, with nothing but the wind to break it. Ryner quietly moved the screens displaying live readouts from Greens scanners to the side. She could still see them, but they were out of her way, allowing her to call up the weapons controls.

She didn't like this.

She didn't like the way Dark Green was just watching them, placid as the very trees of Vivasi.

"Something's wrong," Pidge said. "Why is it just sitting there?"

"I don't know." Ryner hesitated. It occurred to her that if this was a parley, the other lion might be waiting for them to say something.

But that would imply that Dark Green was not only intelligent but sapient, and capable of communication.

Before Ryner could figure out what it was they were expected to do, a jolt ran through the Green Lion. Her attention focused in on something much closer than the lion on the lip of the cliff.

Something inside Green herself.

Pidge summoned their bayard, though it remained inactive at their side. They glanced around, eyes wide, and met Ryner's eyes only briefly.

Then, abruptly, Green went quiet, retreating deeper into the bond. (Retreating to a safe distance, it seemed to Ryner.)

At almost the same moment, text appeared on the viewscreen, blotting out Ryner's view of Dark Green.

 **I don't have a lot of time,** the text read. **So, please. Listen to me.**

* * *

_Interrogation._

One word, and Meri's skin was crawling. She'd never seen the aftereffects of a druid's interrogation, but she'd heard whispers. She'd heard enough to know she never wanted to be on the receiving end.

And yet here she was. Walking to her own fate, head held high. There was no knife to her ribs saying she had to continue on. She could have turned tail and run and no one would stop her--or so it seemed. Meri knew it wasn't so simple. There would be druids posted between her and any exit, and they would have orders to stop her by any means.

Haggar didn't need to have Meri in her grasp to begin the torture.

The odd calm, the _numbness_ , clung to Meri as she traced familiar paths to the elevator, then pressed the button for the restricted floor--the one floor her biosignature hadn't yet been registered to. The control panel prompted her for an authorization key, and she inserted the keycard she'd been given.

A bluff.

This had to be a bluff.

If Haggar had discovered her true identity, there would be no courteous invitation to the interrogation. She would have been arrested and dragged in here, or else killed on the spot.

No, worst case scenario was Haggar suspected something, and was hoping to scare Meri into blowing cover by giving her a chance to run. The only answer was to follow orders, lie through her teeth, and pray to the ancients that she didn't get herself killed.

The corridor stretching out from the elevator was abandoned when Meri arrived, an unsettling quiet blanketing the entire floor. Her footsteps rang loud in her own ears as she crept forward, glancing at the doors she passed in search of Interrogation Room 2A. It took some time, but she found it eventually: a heavy, nondescript door. Soundproofed, no doubt.

Meri inserted the key card into the lock pad beside the door, her heart skipping a beat when the indicator light flashed blue. The door slid silently aside, and Meri stepped into an antechamber that was divided from the interrogation room itself by a pane of tinted glass. It was dark in the antechamber, a pair of techs seated at the control panel against the far wall. The room beyond, in contrast, was brightly lit.

It was also already occupied.

"Reza."

Meri stiffened, but managed to constrain herself to something almost composed as she turned around. "Lady Haggar," she said, clapping her hand to her shoulder in a Galran salute. "You summoned me?"

Haggar's lips quirked upward, but her tone remained icy in a way that suggested she was displeased--perhaps disappointed that Meri had actually turned up. "I did. I'm sure you're tired of waiting, so once I had a suitable subject lined up, it was only courteous to avoid any further delays."

Meri hesitated. "A... suitable subject, my Lady?"

"Prisoner 254-9877." Haggar nodded to the Galra strapped to the table on the other side of the glass. Their eyes were wide, and they tugged at their restraints, hands grasping at empty air. "We suspect she has betrayed us. Sold our secrets to Voltron and their allies, perhaps organized a rebellion or two within our borders. It took time to trace the clues back to her, but now that we have her, Lord Zarkon desires answers."

"Yes, Lady Haggar." The words fell from numb lips, and Meri watched apart from herself as she followed Haggar to the control terminal, where Haggar pulled up files on the prisoner. She had been a petty officer stationed on the front lines, and the evidence against her was circumstantial at best. That should have made Meri feel better, that the prisoner she was to interrogate was in all likelihood a loyal Imperialist.

It didn't.

"This is your next test," Haggar said, smile turning saccharine. "Extract the name of the prisoner's co-conspirators, along with any other plans they have in motion. You may use whatever techniques you wish, so long as you deliver results."

And that was it. No way to game the system, no time to prepare. Just an interrogation room and a prisoner strapped to the table.

She couldn’t do this. Interrogate someone, even someone who might be an enemy? _Torture them_ , because that certainly was what Haggar expected of her. Meri had learned a million ways to tease information out of people who knew more than she did. How to sweet-talk, how to bluff, how to posture and ask leading questions and piece together information from a dozen different sources.

But that was all geared toward espionage. She’d learned how to gain information subtly, slowly, and without drawing attention. None of that would work here, and she couldn’t stomach the thought of doing things Haggar’s way.

She had to.

Meri entered the interrogation chamber on autopilot, hating the way she couldn’t see into the antechamber from this side. She felt eyes watching her, judging her, and it made her want to run away.

 _This wasn’t part of the plan,_ she thought desperately. _It wasn’t supposed to come down to this._ And yet she’d come, demanded a space in Haggar’s private circle, all but demanded the test itself. What right did she have to complain now? She’d told Ulaz and Dez that gaining access to Vindication was worth any cost. She was willing to sacrifice her life for a shot at bringing Commander Holt home safe.

Why should she draw the line here?

It seemed to take an eternity to cross the room to the metal slab where the prisoner was being held, though Meri knew it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. The prisoner watched her, lips pulling back into a snarl.

“Finally!” she snapped. “Are you here to let me go?”

“Not yet,” Meri said, shock making her voice hollow. “I’m afraid we have a few questions for you first.”

The prisoner laughed, refusing to show weakness, even when faced with interrogation. “Go ahead and ask, then. I have nothing to hide. I have always been loyal. I have fought in hundreds of battles. Brought down countless enemies. I--”

“Enough,” Meri said. She couldn’t let herself listen to the woman’s spiel. It would have been all too easy to justify what she had to do, and she didn’t want that. Especially not when Dez had taken great care to enlighten Meri to the reality of espionage within the Galra Empire. You did what needed to be done. You killed whoever you had to kill and followed whatever orders came your way. You endured, because no one else could do your job.

This woman could be telling the truth and be an ally of Voltron at the same time.

At the rate Meri was going, she’d soon be able to recite a list of deeds just as sordid to “prove” her undying loyalty to Zarkon.

In the mean time, she had to keep sight of what really mattered here.

Commander Holt. Vindication.

Her team needed her to do this, so she would do it.

If it cost her her soul, so be it.

She’d already turned her back on her entire people to secure her own survival; after that, how could she pretend to be innocent?

“I’m feeling generous today,” Meri said, turning her back on the prisoner to study the instruments that had been arranged for her: scalpels, suture kits, branding irons, syringes full of unknown poisons, and more. The Quintessence in the air soured slightly with fear—and for Meri to have sensed it, the woman must have been damn near petrified. Meri smiled to herself. “Tell me who you were working with, and this doesn’t have to get ugly.”

* * *

Pidge stared at the words on the screen, utterly dumbfounded. _I don’t have much time? You need to listen?_ What the hell?

**I’m a friend. I swear.**

Pidge scowled. “Green, what is this? Who’s writing these messages?” They pulled up a keyboard and tried to trace the source of the message. Was it coming from Dark Green? Something else in the area? Neither option made sense.

Green rumbled, her presence confused. Pidge felt her trying to put it into words, but whatever it was she sensed was too nebulous for that. She offered something like a scent instead—a scent Pidge could only assume corresponded to the person sending these messages. It smelled familiar.

...It smelled like pain.

(It was an odd thing to think. Pidge wouldn’t have thought that pain _had_ a scent. But that was the first thing they thought of when Green offered the scent, and it stuck in their head. Whoever this was, they were hurting. They needed help.)

Then Green pressed a memory into Pidge and Ryner’s minds. Another message, from the last time they’d met Dark Green. _Go. You need to go, Pidge._

Pidge’s breath left them in a rush. “You’re saying that wasn’t you? I thought...”

 _**Not me,** _ Green said, and presented that hurt scent again.

“And it’s the same person this time?” Ryner asked, lifting her gaze to look out through the viewscreen at the other lion.

Green hesitated. _**Maybe.** _

“Maybe?” Pidge asked.

Green offered the scent again—first the one from last time, then the one from right now. Pidge couldn’t tell a difference, but they always had a hard time understanding Green when she tried to talk in pheromones and fragrances. _**The same,** _ she said. _**But different.** _

Pidge glanced at Ryner. “I… guess I’ll just have to take your word for that. You think we can trust this person?”

“I think we should see what they have to say,” Ryner said.

"Okay," Pidge said, fighting against something in them that said this was wrong. Not just wrong, but dangerous. They'd come here expecting a trap, and Pidge's gut was screaming that this _was_ that trap. Somehow. But the only other option was to leave, abandoning any lead they might find here. "What... uh, actually-- Can you hear me?"

 **Yes. I am** The cursor blinked a few times before the last two words disappeared and a new sentence appeared in their place. **It's difficult to explain what's happening. For all intents and purposes, I am in the cockpit with you. I just can't talk to you directly. Or interact with you in any meaningful way. But I can see and hear you just fine.**

"Oh." Pidge tried not to be creeped out by that, but it was hard. They glanced around the shadowed corners of the room, searching for some sign of where this stranger might be standing. "Okay, uh... What did you want to talk to us about?"

The cursor flashed on the screen, and then a single word appeared. **Vindication.**

Pidge's mouth ran dry. "The project they transferred my dad to," they said. "Yeah. What can you tell us about it?"

**Not much. Your father is still alive.**

"He is? You've seen him?" Pidge shook their head against Ryner's flash of caution through the bond. Their heart was pounding, tears pressing at their eyes. "Do you know where he is? Can you take me to him?"

**No. I'm sorry. I... They're controlling my movements. I only managed to get away this time by chance.**

Pidge faltered, their eyes going to Dark Green's still, silent shape. It watched Pidge with glowing eyes, focused and vaguely threatening, but it made no move to attack, even now that Pidge was thoroughly distracted. "Controlling... Are you saying you're Dark Green?"

No new words appeared on the screen, and slowly Pidge's mind slid into the dark, uncomfortable thought they'd been trying to hold at bay. They'd been to a robeast research station before; they'd read all about the prisoners who were being used to power and control the robeasts--ordinary people, still living. Their lives, their Quintessence, had been linked to the robeasts such that killing one killed the other.

"Are you... inside that thing? Piloting it, or powering it, or whatever?"

Another beat of anticipation, another flash of the cursor. Then...

**Yes.**

Pidge shot a look at Ryner, who seemed as sickened by this whole exchange as Pidge was. The robeast pilot--Dark Green's pilot--was still alive. Still _aware_. Knowing that, how were they supposed to take down the false lion?

"What can you tell us about the lion?" Ryner asked, her voice hard. "Is there some way to shut it down without hurting you?"

**I don't know yet. I'm very limited in what I can do, and I haven't been able to find any useful files on the design of this thing. I'm looking, but**

The words disappeared before the sentence was complete, leaving the cockpit feeling oddly empty. There was no tangible change to the space--Dark Green's pilot hadn't ever actually been here. But Pidge couldn't shake the feeling that their presence had left, if only just for a moment.

When they returned, Green sensed it, and ice slid down Pidge's spine at the idea of someone--anyone, even someone who was ostensibly friendly--being able to slip into Green's head so easily.

**I have to go.**

"What?" Pidge grabbed for the controls automatically, every sense on alert for signs of an impending attack. They checked the scanners and felt Ryner doing the same beside them. Nothing seemed to have changed--at least not yet.

 **I'm sorry. I can't let them find me with you.** Dark Green finally moved, her head turning toward the sky as she gathered her legs beneath her.

Pidge caught themself thinking of it as _her_ and balked. That thing wasn't a Voltron Lion. It just wasn't, and treating it like it was set a dangerous precedent.

**I'll try to contact you again, but I can't be sure when that will be. Stay safe, Pidge.**

Pidge's mouth was open, a dozen questions hanging on the tip of their tongue, but it all fell away at the sight of their name on the screen. The pilot had called them by name last time, too.

They could easily explain it away. This person knew who their dad was, and that he _was_ Pidge's dad. Whether they'd met Sam and learned from him, or whether they'd found it in some record on a Galra base somewhere, it made no difference. Pidge's name was probably all over the Empire by now.

But something about the message felt more personal than that.

They watched in silence as the pilot's presence faded from Green's mind and Dark Green took off for the upper atmosphere. It was gone in seconds, disappearing into the glow of the sun, and Pidge was left feeling vaguely unsettled.

"I don't like this," Ryner said.

Pidge shuddered, tearing their mind away from Dark Green and its pilot. "You're telling me."

"No." Ryner's voice was grim, her thoughts tugging Pidge toward cynicism. "We shouldn't trust that person, whoever they claim to be."

The force of Pidge's rejection of that thought caught them by surprise. "What? Why not? Didn't you feel them, Ryner? They're hurting. They need our help."

"How did they know when we would be here?"

Pidge stopped short, skin prickling. "What?"

"They left the message for us at Renxora, presumably," she said. "But all it said was to come here. Then that person claims to have escaped only by chance, and only for a short time?" Skepticism bordering on outright hostility prickled at the back of Pidge's mind, where their bond with Ryner resided. "There's more going on here than they're telling us. At _best_ , they've been watching us. At worst..."

"This entire thing was a setup." Pidge sat back in their seat, feeling utterly spent. "Shit."

Ryner smiled grimly. "Maybe that person is a victim. It's certainly worth looking into. But that lion they pilot is one of the most dangerous enemies we've yet faced. We can't let this encounter blind us to that fact."

Pidge nodded. "It won't," they said. "We'll be careful. But if they have information on my dad?"

"We'll weigh our options when that time comes. For now, let's get back to the castle. It's not safe out here."

* * *

Meri was going to be sick.

She was already justifying it to herself, in a cold, calculating voice that sounded nothing like her own. It hadn't been torture. It hadn't been as bad as what the other druids would have done. She'd only done what she had to to survive and keep her cover intact. That was the job she'd volunteered for, and that was the job she had to see through. People were counting on her.

And she hated herself for that.

The prisoner didn't fight as she was taken away, though she did stagger, clutching her head. She looked miserable.

A forced injection of someone else's Quintessence would do that to a person. Meri would know.

"Well done."

Haggar's voice, soft and wheedling. It plucked at Meri's last nerve, but she turned anyway. Her face didn't show her inner turmoil, but neither could she force a smile. She was just a passenger in this scene, watching as someone else drew out the names of three co-conspirators.

Actual rebels? Meri couldn't be sure. She prayed they weren't, that the woman had just lied to make the torment stop. (That was the problem with torture, after all. After a point, people would say anything. People would _lie_ , just for the desperate hope of relief.)

But it wasn't torture. She hadn't touched the the instruments on the waiting trays except to show them off, hoping fear would loosen the prisoner's tongue. Of course she wasn't that lucky. Haggar wouldn't give her just anyone to interrogate as part of this test. Only someone who was determined not to break. Meri had tried everything. Coaxing, trickery, intimidation, outright threats.

There was only so long she could continue with such soft tactics before Haggar's gaze had begun to prickle at the nape of her neck. Silent judgment, waiting to order her execution.

Meri wouldn't go for blood. That was her line, the one line she refused to cross. An arbitrary line, to be sure. There was nothing pure or innocent about any of this. But Meri would rather die than cut open a woman who was strapped down and helpless.

The Quintessence injector had been her last, desperate ploy. She'd pulled it off her own wrist and slipped it onto the prisoner, her voluminous sleeves concealing the movement, and then Meri just had to call on her Quintessence, make it look like she was delving into the prisoner's mind magically and not simply poisoning the woman.

(Short-lived poison, with no lasting effects in such a small dose, not that the woman was likely to live long enough to appreciate it.)

Mind games. That was what this was. Haggar playing with Meri's mind, trying to get her to crack, to reveal herself. Meri redirecting those mind games onto the prisoner. She was only fortunate the prisoner had broken down first, spilling her secrets with comparatively little prompting once Meri applied that little bit of pressure. She would have cracked anyway, once Haggar or one of the other druids got their hands on her. Those people she'd given up would have died either way. Meri had at least made sure she didn't have to suffer their tortures.

It didn't make it right.

But that was okay. Meri's life was one big chain of regret. Everything she was now was built upon the corpses of those who had died to protect her, willingly or otherwise. Lealle. Alfor. All of Altea, all the other peoples and planets Zarkon had crushed while Meri went to the bar with Rosa and played games with Lance.

Haggar was still watching her, a smirk gracing her features, and Meri shoved her self-loathing down. She'd asked for this. She'd demanded the right to come here and infiltrate Haggar's circle. She couldn't blame anyone else but her own damn self.

"You used Quintessence," Haggar said. "Not many people learn that trick on their own."

"I've learned to be... resourceful," Meri said, a jagged edge to her voice. She hoped Haggar didn't take that for the emotional exhaustion it was.

Haggar smiled. "Crude, but effective."

Meri scowled, letting her self-loathing turn outward. "I am aware. Why else do you think I came here but to learn refinement? They say you can pry a man's mind open with a single word. Even the strongest minds open to you."

"Indeed. Perhaps a demonstration is in order?" Haggar reached out a hand, her sleeve sliding back to reveal smooth, furless amethyst skin. Her clawed fingers brushed Meri's hood aside, reaching for her temple.

Meri froze. She knew, with horrifying certainty, that if Haggar gained access to her mind it would be over in a second. Everything she had risked, everything she had endured to get here--it would all be wasted. The prisoner and her co-conspirators, damned for nothing.

And she couldn't make herself move.

It was like staring down a mountain lion. If you flinched, if you looked away, you signaled weakness, and the predator would pounce. (Or was it like staring down a bear, instead? Was standing her ground a challenge? Did Haggar _want_ her to bow?)

It didn't make a difference. Meri was frozen, staring down her own demise, her skin crawling where Haggar touched her. The end may well be coming, but there was nothing Meri could do to stop it. She couldn't even bring herself to be afraid.

After a moment, Haggar smiled, withdrawing her hand.

"Some other time, perhaps," Haggar whispered. "When we have another subject to study. It's quite... difficult... to dissect what is happening when you're the one on the receiving end."

The phantom touch of Haggar's claws lingered on Meri's skin, and she shivered as Haggar turned her back.

"In any case, congratulations."

Meri's heart started beating again at the words, and she finally found her voice. "Then I passed?"

Haggar turned, her eyes glowing in the deep shadows of her hood. "You intrigue me, Reza. I will concede that much. You have the rest of the day free, and I advise you take it to rest. The real work begins in the morning."

* * *

Sam woke to darkness, weightlessness, and a fog in his head. He wasn't in the lab, and he wasn't in the cell, which meant...

He opened his eyes, and sure enough found himself staring at the void of space. So he was back in the robeast. He didn't remember the moment of connection. It had been so clear the first time: the connection, the sense of a larger consciousness subsuming his, the launch of the robeast.

This time, there had been only darkness.

A headache had taken root at the base of his skull--either a holdover from something they'd done to his physical body that had had enough of an impact to leave a psychic echo, or else some sort of damage that had been dealt to the robeast itself.

It would have to be something horrific for it to hurt this much though, surely. Sam felt the shell like it was his own body, but every sensation was muted.

Maybe the damage was what had knocked him out, and had perhaps scrambled his memories.

He reached out, queasiness swelling as the headache redoubled. Whoever had attacked, they were long gone now. It was just Sam and the robeast here now, drifting through an asteroid belt.

He was alone.

He should rest.

(The thought didn't come from him, but he listened anyway, and as a deep, slick satisfaction trickled into the back of his mind, he let the darkness claim him once more.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Summary of Meri's test: Haggar instructs Meri to interrogate a prisoner--an officer from Zarkon's army suspected of treason. The evidence is circumstantial, and there's no way to know for sure which side she's on. Meri is given a variety of implements of torture to use in the interrogation and threatens their use, but does not actually use them. She instead uses her Quintessence injector to force foreign Quintessence into the prisoner's system to weaken her mental defenses/make it easier to convince her to talk. In doing this, Meri makes Haggar believe she has figured out some crude form of Quintessential mind manipulation. The prisoner gives up several names, and Meri passes the test, though she's disgusted with herself for what she did.


	35. Voltron Radio

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Akira was injured in a Guard battle and as a result had a fight with Shiro, but they made up, and Shiro finally opened up to his brother about his trauma. After Hunk and Shay's Unity, the paladins' families opted to stay on the castle-ship instead of returning to New Altea. Hunk and Shay have freed another Balmera, now named Atsiphos, after killing a robeast-like creature with possible ties to the Vkullor egg Haggar took from Earth. Keith and Lance returned to the homeworld and were separated after a battle against Arel's brother Vit. They have now reunited and are headed to a secondary contact point for the resistance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the missed update last week, folk! I realized too late that I needed to add in one last scene. I'm going to be sticking with an every-other week update schedule for the next little while, though, as one of my original projects has recently recaptured my attention. This fic isn't being abandoned by any means, I'm just splitting my time between two big projects and don't want to rush any of the upcoming chapters.
> 
> Anyway, enjoy the chapter!

Akira let Layeni take the lead in hand-to-hand training.

Not that he'd ever really planned to lead the class. He didn't have delusions of grandeur. He'd sparred with Takashi a few more times since the near-disaster at the Zhek Chain, and he wasn't embarrassing himself today, but he wasn't at the top of the class. Not by a longshot.

At the center of a ring of Guardsmen, Layeni sparred with Chel, a Balmeran from the Sixth Generation. Chel was a far cry from most Balmerans Akira had met--she'd grown up with smugglers, fighting back against an Empire that had ripped her family away from their Balmera. Where most Balmerans were comparatively cautious and averse to violence, Chel was among the most experienced warriors in the Guard, and she wasn't afraid to use her size to her advantage in a fight.

But Layeni was no pushover, either. She'd trained as a marksman, so she preferred to fight at range, but Akira had seen her tearing through enemy ranks with a machete, and she'd already managed to pin Chel in one of their matches.

Ostensibly, this show was to give the Guardsmen a taste for what hand-to-hand looked like when both parties knew what they were doing. In reality, it wasn't instructive so much as awe-inspiring. Not just because Layeni was an attractive woman, and Akira had a weakness for attractive women kicking ass, but it was hard to pick out many details at all at the pace they were moving.

Layeni ducked out of Chel's grasp, spun into a kick that took Chel's feet out from under her, then danced back as Chel turned the fall into a roll, reversed, and sprang at Layeni in retribution.

They'd taken over the largest training room in Blue Tower for the day, and Layeni had recruited two dozen other Guardsmen with close combat experience to train the rest of them. Other groups had set up around the room, some running drills, some sparring, others watching demonstrations by the instructors.

Layeni mistimed her next dodge, and Chel carried her to the ground, pinning her before she could slip away.

"Apologies, Lieutenant Commander," Chel said with a grin, helping her up. "Shall we make it three out of five?"

Layeni grimaced, stretching her back. "I know when to admit defeat." She waved off a water pouch from one of Chel's squadmates and turned back to the watching Guardsmen--Akira and the rest of the intermediate class. This was the largest sub-group by far, making up more than half of the Guard. Fifty or so pilots, including Jeya, were in the beginners tier to learn the basics, as most of them had taught themselves to fly and had made a deliberate decision to stay out of fist fights. Another seventy—the intermediate class--had come from rebellions, local militias, or independent resistance groups and had learned how to defend themselves out of necessity. Some lacked refinement, others only practice, but they could all hold their own.

Akira was comfortably middle of the pack, which meant he was here, learning more complex things than how to stand and how to throw a punch without breaking his fist, but not yet moving on to fighting in earnest.

"We're working on grapples today," Layeni said, "in case that wasn't obvious enough already. Grapples, and how to slip out of them. We'll walk you through it more slowly, now that we've shown you what it looks like in practice. Everyone pair off."

Akira let himself be claimed by Rizavi, one of the new transfers from the Garrison, and they walked through the moves together as Laeyni and Chel demonstrated. Akira was slippery enough that it wasn't hard to weasel his way free (though he was sure it would be more difficult with someone who knew what they were doing) but grappling Rizavi in turn was considerably more difficult. She was rambunctious, and she had a tendency to rush into things, but her boasting wasn’t entirely unplaced. He’d have been annoyed at her attempts to goad him if she wasn’t so charismatic.

After half an hour, Layeni called a break, and Akira wandered over to the hatches on the wall that dispensed water pouches. His steps slowed as he broke away from the group, however. There on the balcony overlooking the training room floor was Zuza and Wyn--Wyn balanced atop the handrail, one leg dangling over the balcony, Zuza leaning against the railing beside him. She beamed as she noticed Akira looking at her, then wiggled her fingers.

Akira grabbed his water pouch and headed for the stairs that led up to the balcony. He could only imagine this area had been used for some kind of sporting event before the fall of Altea--not only did it remind him of a gymnasium, but the seats were arranged in steep ranks to give everyone a view of the floor. Not to mention the apparatus hanging from the ceiling, which Akira could only assume projected video from better angles.

"Hey, Akira!" Zuza called when he emerged from the stairwell between two sections of seats. Wyn gave a more subdued smile before turning his attention back to the floor below. The other two groups were still going at it--though to Akira's surprise, Wyn wasn't watching the matches in the advanced group, like a number of other Guardsmen were. He was focused instead on the beginners group, where Griffin (another former Garrison pilot) was walking his pupils through a slow series of blocks and sidesteps.

"Hey." Akira claimed a stretch of railing near Zuza and Wyn, then poked his straw into his water pouch and took a long drink. It was surprising how much of a workout it was just dancing around and trying not to get caught. He watched the other two for a moment before asking, as casually as he could, "What brings you two down here?"

Wyn shrugged. "I wanted to see what sort of training you were doing," he mumbled. "See if I could pick up any useful tricks."

Akira blinked. He'd heard that Wyn had started sitting in on Edi's lessons with Allura. He was still young, but he seemed determined to learn at least basic self defense, and this war being what it was--Wyn's past being what _it_ was--no one was inclined to argue.

Actually, Akira was a little surprised that Wyn wasn't down in the action. Akira didn't know the kid that well but he had the kind of energy that lent itself to diving into things without considering the consequences.

"You sure you don't want to get a little closer?" Akira asked. "I'm sure Griffin wouldn't mind having another student if you wanted to learn."

Wyn glanced at him, narrowing his eyes like Akira was trying to trick him somehow, then just turned away and shrugged. "I'm fine up here."

Akira shrugged. "Okay. What about you, Zuza?" He elbowed her in the side. "You want to get in on the boot campy fun?"

Zuza laughed, though it sounded strained. "Me? No way." She smiled, but it slipped soon after as her gaze drifted back to the training room floor. "It'd be good for a laugh, I'll give you that. But... I don't think I'm cut out for that sort of thing."

Akira frowned, but Layeni clapped her hands just then, calling the sixty second warning.

"Go on," Zuza said, waving her hand at him. "I'm good up here."

Akira wasn't sure that was true, but he went just the same, giving her an uncertain look backwards over his shoulder.

* * *

Hunk was slowly getting used to politics.

He wasn't sure he'd ever enjoy it, per se, but at least when he was working with Balmeran Elders he didn't feel quite so much like bashing his head against the wall. This wasn't like the summit, or the posturing that led up to it. This wasn't smiling pretty and making sure not to offend anybody.

This was problem-solving, plain and simple.

Yes, there were disagreements. There were clashing priorities, and tensions ran high. The Atsiphos elders had only had a few days to adjust to freedom. Their Balmera was still weak, their people still worried about retribution—and the discovery that it hadn’t been the cybernetic creature killing their Balmera, after all, had come as a severe blow to their spirits.

A parasite. Some on Metos remembered stories about similar infections—hive-minded creatures feeding off Balmera, devouring them from within and hijacking the song to get the Balmerans to work for the parasite. Whatever name the creature had had was long since lost, but the horror persisted. Horror that was all the thicker because, apparently, the Galra had brought in their monstrosity to hold the parasite at bay. Its Vkullor-like aura had blinded the parasite, limiting its ability to spread, and now with the creature gone, the parasite was wreaking havoc. Allura and Coran had led a team of Alteans to help replenish Atsiphos' Quintessence stores, and Olkari engineers were building defensive arrays—to guard against the parasite as much as the Empire--but the people still needed reassurance.

Metos and Theros, meanwhile, had set their sights on the next target: finding a Migration. It was their best chance at learning how to defend themselves, and how to deal with unknown threats like the parasite. Still there were those who thought free Balmera were a fantasy and wanted to redouble their efforts to free as many Balmera as possible before Zarkon got wise.

They were all worthy goals, as far as Hunk was concerned--not like some of Voltron's other potential allies, who just wanted to profit off the war. So while it was frustrating, while Shay sometimes had to put a hand on his arm to get him to breathe before he snapped at someone, it still felt like they were making headway.

Slowly, but headway all the same.

"We must find a Migration," Rua said. "It is the best defense we have."

"And make ourselves more of a target?" asked Jhan, of Atsiphos. "Have we not already given the Galra enough reason to want us dead? The more of our number we gather in one place, the more likely Zarkon is to strike."

"But the free Balmera know things we do not," Shay argued. "I agree with Elder Lem; we will not abandon the other Balmera who languish under Zarkon's command. But should we not look to the future? We will forever be grasping at echoes unless we find those who have not had their people's knowledge stolen from them. The free Balmera have much to teach us."

" _If_ they exist." Jhan shook his head. "Some day, yes, we must reclaim what was lost. But our position now is too precarious. And what if the Empire already knows about the old paths? What if they lie in wait for us there?"

Hunk crossed his arms, glancing around the circle. The Elders were meeting at the heart of Metos, the largest of the three Balmera. It was a slightly discordant Meet, with three different songs intermingling. At first, it had felt like everyone was singing in a different key, and though they had modulated to Metos' song, there were still moments where something went awry.

Maybe that was the long hours and high stakes of this meeting. Metos had finally embraced Olkari defenses, and the Elders of Atsiphos had agreed to try, after seeing the defenses on Theros, but defensibility was only one of their concerns. Imperial occupation had drastically reduced food production on the Balmera, and there were few resources to be taken that wouldn't hurt the abused creatures further. Hunk and Shay had encouraged the Elders to put in a petition with the Coalition, but that was a short term solution. They would need food, medicine, textiles, and technology for the long term, especially on Metos, where the damage was so extensive that the Elders estimated a generation would pass before the Balmera would be able to support life unaided.

Hunk scratched his cheek, making sure his song was soothing before he spoke. "I mean, you don't have to go to the Migration right away. If you're worried about painting a target on your back, then just make contact. See what they have to teach you, then decide if joining the Migration is the right decision."

The Elders quieted. It wasn't like they hadn't thought of this before; Hunk could tell that much from the song. It was just that they all wanted to have a firm plan in place. "Wait and see" didn't sit right with them--ironic, since they'd survived largely by taking things as they came.

Well, they were the leaders of the people, after all. If they didn't act, then Zarkon would. At least, that was the mood hanging over Metos tonight.

Shay hummed appreciatively, reaching a hand out to grip Hunk's arm. "Paladin Hunk is correct. Our immediate priority is securing supplies and fortifying our homes. We will aid each other where we can and petition the Coalition in other cases. Voltron shall continue searching for captive Balmera to liberate, and we will act as information becomes available. In the mean time, we must at least begin to search for any surviving Migrations. Is there nothing in our histories that might point us toward the old paths?"

"Some," Lem said grudgingly. "Nothing certain, and nothing clear. Scholars from Metos and Theros have compiled what we know. If Atsiphos knows anything that may help, we would be grateful. Otherwise..."

"We have whispers," Rua said. "Poetic descriptions of landmarks on the Migration. Nothing to indicate coordinates, or where the Migrations might be _now_."

Shay nodded once, then looked to Hunk. "It is a start. Compile what you know. Hunk and I will investigate. We will be quicker than moving our Balmera, and if Zarkon does lie in wait, we are better equipped to defend ourselves."

Rua nodded, followed slowly by Lem and Jhan. "That is... agreeable. We will meet once more once we have more information and decide then what we are to do."

Hunk smiled as graciously as he could. Three hours of debate to land on "gather more information." He supposed it could be worse; they could have decided to do nothing at all.

It was still frustrating, though, and he was glad when the Meet dissolved, a few clusters of Elders breaking off to discuss their particular projects--coordinating another summit of budding Navigators, detailing what supplies they needed so they could put together a petition for the Coalition, contacting the healers, architects, and other volunteers who were to go to Atsiphos to help rebuild.

It was a tenuous alliance still, but it was coming along. Hunk could be happy for that, even if he was glad to be headed back out to space to chase down missing Balmera who might not even exist anymore.

At least his life was never boring.

* * *

"You can really tell which of them came from an army, huh?" Wyn asked, kicking his feet over the edge of the railing.

Zuza probably should have been more concerned about that, seeing as it was a fifteen foot drop to the floor below. But she figured Wyn was old enough to make his own decisions--and as an Altean, a fifteen foot fall probably wouldn't do more than bruise.

"You think?" she asked, glancing over at the advanced group. They'd divided up into pairs and trios to spar, and watching them, Zuza mostly just thought that any one of them could snap her in two in two seconds flat.

"Sure." Wyn leaned back, pointing towards on of the pairs. "See the Altean and the Pherian over there? The Altean's staying in stance all the time. She knows what she's doing, and she's okay with waiting for the right opening. The Pherian just goes for it, though. He fights dirty, see?"

Zuza didn't see, but she nodded anyway. Wyn was definitely getting more out of this than she was, but she couldn't really begrudge him that. He was here to pick up on whatever lessons he could, claiming that he hoped it might give him a leg up in his own self-defense lessons. Zuza was...

What was Zuza doing here? Moping about how grossly out of place she was, mostly. She wasn't a warrior, and frankly, she wasn't sure she wanted to be.

But she did want to be useful.

She turned her eyes back toward the intermediate class, where Akira was busy trying to replicate a throw that Keturah had demonstrated on a faceless holographic opponent. The AI had shown up fifteen minutes ago, loitering around the edges of the group only briefly before sidling up to Layeni to offer her services.

Zuza had only caught part of the conversation--something about the other paladin AIs taking an interest in the Guard and Keturah wanting to see what all the fuss was about. As if she wasn't just as curious as everyone else. Curious, and maybe a little lonely. Zuza wasn't sure what it was like, being a living computer program, a whole bunch of memories tied up in a holographic shell.

Keturah couldn't hide how much she enjoyed bouncing from group to group, though, doling out advice like she owned the place. Her form had fuzzed once, early on, when she went to correct a Guardsman's stance, only for her hand to phase right through him. Keturah had tried to laugh it off, but she got real quiet after that, her suggestions more subdued until Akira started trying to emulate the more complicated of the moves she'd demonstrated.

(He didn't even come close, but at least Keturah was more exasperated than dejected after that, which honestly might have been Akira's intent.)

It didn't to anything for Zuza's mood, though, and she sighed, pulling back from the railing. "I think I'm going to go see if Coran needs help with any projects around the castle," she told Wyn. "You staying here?"

"For a little while, yeah," Wyn said. "This is really interesting, actually."

Zuza smiled, ruffling his hair. He ducked away from her, scowling, and Zuza chuckled. "Sorry. I'll see you later, Wyn."

"Yeah," Wyn said, turning back to the training down below. "See you."

* * *

"Tell me the truth," Lana said, crossing her arms on the countertop as Eli turned to get started on the sauce for dinner. "Did you piss somebody off back on New Altea?"

Eli made an offended noise. "What? No!"

Lana held up her hands, grinning impishly. "I don't mean any offense. It's just, you've been so tight-lipped about it. Last time that happened, it turned out you'd joined a vigilante group of UFO hunters trying to bring down the Galaxy Garrison."

"In my defense, there really was no way to bring that up in casual conversation."

Lana shook her head, and Eli turned back to his work. Akani was handling the main course. Small surprise. Eli may have picked up a thing or two from his mother and from Rebecca, his business partner who had an intense dislike for fast food and frozen dinners--the usual staples of a couple of freelancers living out of motel rooms.

But with Hunk out on Balmera business, Akani was down a sous chef, and Eli was only too happy to fill in.

He could have done without the third degree from his sister, though.

"Seriously," Lana said. "Last I heard, you were planning on going back after the Unity. Can you blame me for being curious about the change in plans?"

Akani rolled her eyes and reached out to pat Eli on the shoulder as he passed to grab the milk from the--well, it wasn't really a _fridge_ , was it? "Ignore her," Akani said, tossing her voice over her shoulder toward Lana. "You know she can be a busy-body. It's good to have you here."

"Thanks," Eli said. "It's good to be here, honestly. Not that New Altea isn't beautiful, but I missed being in the action."

Lana laughed. "That's my brother. Always running off to chase another storm."

She didn't mean it as an accusation, but it still hit like a punch to the gut. It was true, after all--he was always on the trail of another job. Off to Tornado Alley to chase a twister, off to California to film a company retreat. He'd never stayed in one place for long.

As far back as high school, he'd dreamed of new sights. Lana worked her way through college while taking care of their mother, but Eli? Eli took off two days after graduating high school with a camera, a backpack full of clothes, a hundred dollars, and a plane ticket to LAX--off to hitchhike across the continental United States just to say he'd done it.

That had been the start of his videography career, though it wasn't anything like a steady income back then. He just filmed whatever caught his eye, up to and including a drunk driver who'd wrecked five cars and a store front in his attempt to pull out of a parking spot. Eli had found it funny--but then he'd sold it to a local news station, and suddenly he'd found a way to pay for the rest of his trip.

After that, he could never put down roots again. He went back home for a while, and picked fights with Lana over what at the time had felt like guilt trips and unfair expectations. After they buried their mother, he was off again, and thus started his endless cycle of avoiding family obligations, only ever making it home once every couple of years, no matter how much he intended to be better about making himself a presence in Hunk's life.

Everyone always thought he'd meet someone some day and settle down. Get married, have kids, buy a house. Eli knew a lot of people assumed he was in a relationship with Rebecca. But... he wasn't. He honestly didn't know if he'd ever wanted that, or if he'd just been resigned to what he'd once seen as inevitable.

Sure, he'd met people. He wasn't unaffected by beautiful people. He'd even had a few flings, though they never lasted past the end of his current gig. The call of the road was stronger, and he'd never felt the need to invest in romance. He was fine on his own.

But that meant he'd left his family in the lurch. First with Lana, who worked herself to the bone while Eli was off touring the country. Then with Hunk, who might as well have not had an uncle.

He'd always felt bad about that, but it took losing Hunk to kick his ass in gear and change things. He wanted to be here. He wanted to be involved.

Eli stirred the sauce, tasting it one last time before he set it to simmer, then turned and gave Lana a smile he hoped didn't betray his guilt. "Look, I'll be honest. I was mostly only staying on New Altea for Sebastian. The kid needed something to do, and--" He laughed, a little hysterical. "Let's be real, Sebastian has ordinary problems that I can actually maybe help with. I'm not going to be much use to Hunk."

"You're his uncle," Akani pointed out, her voice cautious. "Having you around is help enough."

Eli smiled, his chest constricting. "Yeah, I guess." He shook his head. "I'm glad to be staying. I am. I'm in way over my head with paladins and wars, but I'm here. And I'm not going anywhere."

Akani squeezed his wrist, and Lana, when he risked a glance her way, was smiling.

Eli still wasn't sure what good he could do here, but he meant what he'd said. He was staying. It was time to stop running away from his family.

* * *

After dinner, Eli tracked down Val, his computer tucked under his arm and his pulse racing with anticipation.

"I've got a new project," he said, claiming a seat beside Val on the couch. "And I thought you might be interested." Nyma and Pidge, who were also here watching a movie, glanced up at his words, though Pidge seemed more interested in whatever they were working on their computer than either Eli or the movie, and they quickly went back to typing furiously.

Val quirked an eyebrow. "A project, oooh. What sort of project?"

Eli drummed his fingers on his laptop, grinning despite himself. "I’m calling it _Voltron Radio_."

* * *

Shay's heart sank as they emerged from a wormhole, once more, to find empty space and nothing of any interest on the scanners.

They had been at this for hours already, following the tenuous leads with which the Balmeran Navigators had provided them. Some they had sent on to Coran to cross-reference with the castle's star charts and historical records; others had already pointed to known stars.

Each time, Shay opened a wormhole with her heart in her throat. She ought not expect an entire Migration to await her on the other side--she knew such a thing was a dream, and it would take a tremendous amount of luck for it to become reality. Yet she still held her breath, leaning forward as the light of wormhole travel cleared, and the sight of unfamiliar stars and lonely planets hit her harder with each repetition.

"Nothing on the scanners," Hunk confirmed, melancholy in his song. He had, at first, taken up his usual post deeper in Yellow's core, ready in case the Empire had claimed the old Migratory Paths.

After the first two hours, however, he had rejoined Shay in the cockpit to monitor the scanners and aid her in searching for signs of a recent Migration.

"No," Shay said. "I do not see anything, either."

"Coran could have been wrong about the location," Hunk said in the tone of one who was attempting to offer comfort that they themself found lacking. "He did warn us the constellation database was incomplete. And we don't know how accurate those charts were, anyway. If they were off even just a little, it could have given us a false match."

Shay hummed. She knew this. She _had_ known this from the start. Some of the old histories kept on Metos mentioned stars and planets by name, but only some, and many of those were names not found in any universal database. Balmerans had their own names for the places they'd seen for thousands of years, and it seemed those names had not often been shared with offworlders.

Most of their leads, then, had come from a number of star charts Navigators had found carved into the walls of deep chambers on all three Balmera. They were most extensive on Atsiphos, who had spent the least time under Zarkon's rule, but even on Metos and Theros, a handful of chambers remained.

They had been a network once, Shay thought. A single continuous tunnel near the heart crystal that mimicked the Paths, with chambers for common feeding grounds and nurseries. These chambers had constellations carved into the walls, and these constellations, once scanned with a holographic camera, could be compared to constellations stored in the castle-ship's archives.

Of course, the Alteans hadn't been everywhere, and they hadn't recorded the night sky from every vantage, and many of the caves had been damaged by mining equipment, cave-ins, and generations of neglect.

The Elders had already begun to organize teams to restore the Migratory Tunnels, and to coordinate with the Balmera to unearth any other surviving chambers, but it would be a slow process, and Shay's thin hope of any of these chambers leading them to an active Migration dwindled more with each wormhole that opened onto nothingness.

"We should... We should take a look around," Hunk said, sensing her sour mood. "You never know; we might find something?"

Shay said nothing, but led Yellow through a broad arc that took them in a slow circuit around the star. No one knew what kind of trail a Balmera Migration left, if it left a trail at all. The castle had no way to track a single Balmera's motion, after all. They vented waste only rarely and otherwise left only trace amounts of Quintessence behind. In the vacuum of space, it dispersed quickly, and even the castle-ship's sensitive scanners could not detect it after an hour.

Still, she searched. They had spent the last three days following the Migratory Path as best they could, using data from the castle and the actual path of the tunnels as guides. They knew the sequence in which the Migration would visit these locations, and they had found references to time frames relative to the ancient Migratory calendar.

Unfortunately, the Migrations had been so long disrupted on Theros, Metos, and Atsiphos that no one had any inkling of how it might line up to the Imperial calendar they all had been forced to adopt.

For almost an hour, they scoured the solar system, spiraling outward to the next-closest star in case Coran's calculations or the carvings themselves had been minutely off. Any anomaly on the scans, any population centers that might have seen something, might provide the clue they needed to find the surviving Migration.

Or perhaps there were no more Migrations. Perhaps once Zarkon began his campaign against the Balmera, they had scattered, trusting to secrecy to evade Zarkon's notice. Perhaps, if the Migrations continued, they followed new Paths, or Paths that the captive Balmera did not know of. Theros and Atsiphos appeared to map the same Path in their tunnels, but nothing yet unearthed on Metos aligned with this map. The Navigators suspected there had been multiple Migrations in the past.

If Zarkon had captured two Balmera from this Migration, then, might he not have captured or killed them all?

"Maybe we should take a break," Hunk said, intruding upon Shay's thoughts. "Come back in a few days with fresh eyes."

Shay shook her head. "We have only a few locations left to check. We should see it through."

"And if we wait, maybe they'll have uncovered more." Hunk paused, leaning heavy on the sympathy in the bond and in his song. "I know how important this is, Shay, but we've been at it for a long time. It won't hurt to focus on something else for a little while."

He was right, and Shay knew it, but she still resisted his suggestion to go. She had pushed for this, and she was loathe to give up with nothing to show for her effort.

Eventually, though, Yellow joined in on the prodding, gentle though it was, and Shay relented. "A break... would be welcome," she said.

Hunk smiled, reaching out to squeeze her arm. "We're not giving up," he promised. "Maybe we'll come at it from a different angle, but we aren't going to give up."

"Yes." Shay input the coordinates for the Castle of Lions, borrowing some of Hunk's resolve. "You are right. But for now, rest."

Yellow purred in approval, and as they exited the wormhole to the sight of the castle, she finally let her weariness show. The force of it caught Shay off guard--Yellow took pride in her ability to persevere. She was not as fast or as strong as her sisters, but she could fly farther than them, endure longer, withstand more damage.

Yet even for her, three days with no results took their toll. She was not physically weary, but she was glad for a change of pace.

Shay was, too.

They left Yellow in her hangar to rest and to reconnect with the other lions and went in search of food and company. Their schedule had drifted, first because of the Meet of Elders on Metos, then because of the long days with nothing but a number on a screen to dictate their sleep cycles.

It was late now on the castle-ship, and many of the others had already sought their rest. Hunk made them a small dinner of steamed vegetables and noodles with meat for Hunk and cave bug for Shay, and they ate in silence. The lights were set to a low level that exacerbated Shay's fatigue, and though they had been awake for only ten hours, she already found herself drowsing.

Hunk stirred his half-eaten dinner with his fork. "Well, hey. At least we might be able to--" He paused to yawn, and Shay nearly did the same. "Might be able to kick ourselves back onto castle time."

Shay smiled. "That is not the worst idea," she said. She ate a few bites more of her dinner, then put the rest with the other leftovers in the chiller. Hunk did the same, and they headed down to the living quarters. Their rooms had seen little use since the Unity, but it was nice to return to familiar quarters. Even if she still preferred the lullaby of a Balmera, the castle-ship had become home to her, and she looked forward to sleeping in her own bed.

Voices greeted them when they stepped off the elevator, coming from the hallway that led to the paladins' families' rooms. The voices were hushed, out of respect for the late hour perhaps, though the walls of the sleeping quarters were thick enough that neighbors would not hear less than a shout.

The voices were animated, though, and light spilled out into the dimly lit corridor.

"Uncle Eli?" Hunk muttered, veering away from his own room. He followed the voices to their source, Shay tagging along out of idle curiosity.

They found Wyn and Maka huddled outside the open door to Eli's room, peeking in and whispering together. Hunk's steps slowed, and he crossed his arms as both boys stiffened, then turned around, Wyn flashing a guilty smile, Maka bristling.

"What's going on in there?" Hunk asked, grinning. "Super top secret stuff? Are we spying?"

Shay breathed out a laugh, pinching Hunk's arm. "It is late," she said to the boys, trying to sound stern--though that had always been Rax's strength. He knew how to make the younglings listen to him; Shay only ever caved to their pleading looks. "You should be asleep."

Wyn dropped his gaze, scuffing his toes along the ground, as Maka crossed his arms. "What's it to you?" he demanded.

The challenge caught Shay off guard, and as she scrambled for a response, she noted that the voices inside the room had gone silent. A moment later, Eli appeared in the door, his head cocked to the side. "Uh, hey there...? Didn't realize we already had an audience."

Wyn wilted still further, tugging on Maka's sleeve. "They're right. We should go to bed."

"Says who? You're not Hava Zelka." Maka stretched for an extra few inches of height, which put him almost to Eli's nose, though both Hunk and Shay were still head and shoulders above him.

Val poked her head out around Eli's shoulders. "Maka? Wyn? What are you doing here?"

"We heard you were doing a radio thing," Wyn mumbled. "We were curious."

"Radio thing?" Hunk asked.

Eli shook his head, smiling at the two boys. "Starting a new project," he told Hunk. "But we're just doing the boring parts right now."

"It doesn't _look_ boring," Maka said.

Val laughed into her hand. "Maybe not. But it takes longer to do than it does to explain. Come back in the morning and I'll tell you all about it."

Wyn looked up at her, eyes wide. "You will?"

"Sure." Eli grinned. "We could use a couple of interns."

Val laughed, but shooed Wyn and Maka off. "Tomorrow. You two need sleep first." She paused, watching them turn and sprint for the elevator, then frowned. "And don't you dare try to wake me up at dawn! I'm sleeping until at least ten o'clock, and I get grumpy when someone disrupts my beauty sleep!"

Wyn raised a hand in acknowledgment, but Maka just kept running, and Val sighed.

"I'm going to need to lock my door, aren't I?"

"Probably a good idea," Eli said. He turned to Hunk and Shay, spreading his arms. "You're back!"

Grinning, Hunk wrapped him in a hug that lifted Eli off his feet. "Just got in a little while ago. Didn't realize how late is was."

Eli waved his hands. "You're moms are going to be jealous I got to see you first, but I don't mind. How'd it go?"

Hunk made a face, and Shay answered for him, since he seemed like he'd rather just throw himself on Eli's bed. Val and Eli returned to the desk, where they had two chairs pulled up beside the computer.

"We have not found anything promising," Shay said. "The hope is that a break from the search will give us time to come up with a new strategy. What are you working on?"

"We're calling it _Voltron Radio,_ " Val said, her legs bouncing as she leaned forward. "It was Eli's idea."

"I heard some of the rebel broadcasts that are going around, right?" Eli spread his arms. "Seemed like a good idea to contribute. Fight back against Zarkon however we can--and spread word of Voltron's campaign."

"There are still too many places we can't get to," Val said. "Zarkon's trying to keep it quiet that someone's fighting back. He's probably afraid our success will inspire other people."

"Which is exactly why we're going to be that inspiration." Eli beamed, leaning back in his chair. "We’ve got the videos I’ve done for the Coalition, but it’s harder to sneak that into Imperial space, so we figured we’d go audio-only. We're still on the brainstorming stage, but it's coming along."

Hunk lifted his head up to look from Eli to Val. "Oh?"

Eli grinned, and Val transferred a file from the computer to a tablet, which she passed over to Hunk. "Take a look. We could use a couple more heads on this, anyway."

* * *

Keturah returned the next day, now with Lealle and Rukka in tow. (Sa had begged off, citing combat training's objective dullness and his own promise to help Coran sift through the Balmeran star charts--not exactly his area of expertise, but interesting all the same.)

Akira didn't mind having the old paladins around. They had plenty of practical advice to offer, even if all of them relied on strength a human like Akira simply didn't have. And they were good-natured about the lack of experience in evidence around the room. Well, Lealle and Rukka were, and they spent most of their time wandering through the beginner group to correct stances and demonstrate proper form.

Which, honestly, was a tremendous help. The Guard didn't have enough instructors as it was, and they all needed the instruction. Lealle helped out the newbies, Rukka bounced between them and the intermediate class, and Keturah helped the advanced students refine their technique.

Akira was grateful.

He also couldn't help but wonder if he was living up to their expectations.

As the day progressed, he found himself tracking their progress around the room without thinking about it--but none more than Keturah, who seemed to be always about to walk up behind him and chide him for poor stance or overreaching or whatever. It didn't matter that she had yet to _actually_ come within twenty feet of him. It felt like she was breathing down his neck.

She'd been the red paladin, after all. She must have felt responsible for Keith and Matt, at least a little, even if she didn't show it. So of course it made sense that she would show up here on a flimsy pretense. She wanted to size Akira up, see if he was up to the job of red adjunct.

...Or Akira was just paranoid.

"I think you've gotten worse, sir," Rizavi said with a cheeky grin. She’d just shattered Akira's guard, but rather than end the match, she backed off.

Akira found his balance, the back of his neck itching. He resisted the urge to look for Keturah, who was probably busy with someone who had a lot more skill than Akira. "I think you're right." Akira raised his arms over his head, grunting as the motion stretched sore muscles. "Sorry. I'm just a little off my game. You want to find a new partner?"

Rizavi waved him off. "Honestly? I don't mind taking it easy today. I haven't been run this hard since hell week."

Akira grinned. "On the bright side, I'm not waxing nostalgic for Iverson yet."

Rizavi’s laugh drew a sharp look from Layeni, and Akira quickly straightened, putting on a show of diligence until she went back to the pair she was instructing. Akira snuck a glance her way, then relaxed, nodding to the side of the room, where they had water and protein bars available. A few other Guardsmen were already over there. Akira and told Layeni she could push the men, but only so far. Discipline was, unfortunately, necessary, but when a distress call might come in at any moment, they always needed to be ready.

Akira wondered if Keturah thought less of him for decisions like that, and for the way he joked around with his subordinates. He was, objectively, a terrible commander, with little regard for the chain of command and no patience for the harsher elements of a traditional boot camp. These pilots didn't need it, anyway. They weren't civilians; they weren't ignorant of the realities of war. Everyone in this room had lost someone to Zarkon's armies. Most of them had seen death with their own eyes. They knew what they were getting into. They knew what they had to be afraid of, and how to go on fighting anyway.

He wondered if that was why Layeni had agreed to his insistence that she run this training more leniently. He wondered if she saw what Akira did. Probably, right? She was the soldier Akira had never been. Had never _wanted_ to be. He'd been perfectly happy as a cargo pilot before the war came to Earth.

But what about Keturah? She was a paladin of peacetime who'd been thrust into war. Was she, like Akira, an idealist forced into something beyond her scope of experience? Or did she look at the Guard and see a band of raw recruits who weren't ready for the fight they'd signed up for?

Akira turned as he stuck a straw in his water pouch. He found Keturah almost instantly, as he had each time before, almost as if the paladin bond extended to her memory profile, granting Akira that same uncanny _awareness_ he had where Keith and Matt were concerned.

Each time before when Akira had looked for her, she'd been focused on instruction. This time, though, she met his gaze, her face unreadable. Akira froze, refusing to be the first to look away. He wanted her to be proud of him. It was a strange thing to think when the person in question had been dead for ten thousand years, but it was the truth.

One of the advanced students called Keturah's attention back to training and she turned away, giving Akira no sign of what she might be thinking.

Frowning, Akira downed the rest of his water, then gestured Rizavi back out onto the floor. "Come on," he said. "I need to redeem myself."

* * *

"Culture Corner?" Sebastian asked, his voice dry.

Val fluttered her hands, hardly looking up from the computer, where she and Eli were poring over audio settings. "The title's a work in progress. And I know you're not always a spotlight kind of guy, so it's fine if you don't want to do it. Or, like? Write it, but not do the actual broadcast? Mateo, don't touch that."

Sebastian glanced over to the equipment set up on the far side of the room. Maka and Wyn had apparently discovered the "Voltron Radio" project last night and had returned today, Mateo in tow, to get a closer look at the transmitter and encryption software Val and Eli were going to use.

"I don't know that I really have anything to share," Sebastian said, dragging his attention back to his sister. When she'd called him down here, he'd honestly figured she just wanted him to get Mateo out of her hair. Both of Lance's siblings had developed a habit of getting underfoot since their parents, along with Sebastian's, had decided to stay on the castle-ship. (They'd tossed around a million excuses of missing Val and Lance and Tía Rosa, and about the school that had started up here for the staff's families, but everyone knew they were just staying to keep an eye on Sebastian.)

Val frowned, lowering the pen she'd been chewing on for the last ten minutes. "You have the stuff from the Balmera. You could ask what of that they'd be okay with you sharing. Or--ooh! What if it was a series of interviews? Get one of the history keepers or Elders on the show and let them talk about their people!"

The idea tugged at Sebastian, he had to admit, but it was a daunting commitment. "How many people are even going to listen?" he asked. "Voltron, the war, getting back at Zarkon--sure. People are angry enough, they'll listen to that. Isn't history a little too... academic for what you're doing?"

"I don't know," Val said. "Zarkon's stripped a lot of people of their cultural identity. Talking about those things he tried to steal _is_ an act of defiance. Maybe there are Balmerans out there who will hear the broadcast, you don't know. Maybe your ‘academic’ interview will give them a reason to keep fighting." She paused, noticing Sebastian's hesitation. "Think about it," she said. "It'll take us a little while to get off the ground, anyway."

Sebastian nodded, lapsing back into silence as the others continued to work. Hunk, Pidge, and Coran had all rotated through over the course of the day, offering their help with the recording and broadcasting setup. As Sebastian understood it, it was really more of a podcast than radio.

But it _did_ sound interesting. And he _had_ started to worry about what would happen once the Balmeran database was finished. He'd almost made it through the initial catalog, and several of the younger keepers had expressed an interest in learning how to use the database themselves. Sebastian couldn't very well say no just because he was afraid he'd backslide without work to keep him busy.

He wondered for a moment if Val had picked up telepathy while she was off learning how to be in two places at once, but that was absurd. She'd already given Eli credit for the _Voltron Radio_ idea, and something like this--this...resistance journalism or whatever she wanted to call it--was exactly the sort of thing she would get excited about. Inviting Sebastian to join was just her way of saying she cared.

He wasn't sure he was ready to take on a project like this--bigger and more public than anything else he'd ever done.

But he wasn't ready to turn down Val's offer, either.

So he stayed, curled up in an arm chair as the others buzzed around, their infectious energy bringing a smile to his face.

* * *

"The Imperial forces arrived three days after you left," Mirek said. "Contingents touched down in the four largest city enclosures simultaneously, relieved the local government of authority, and instituted...well, it’s not officially martial law, but it’s treading a fine line."

Keith looked up from the cot he'd claimed upon arriving at the safe house. It was unprofessional, but he didn't care. It had taken almost another four hours to get here from the shuttle, and his legs felt about ready to fall off—and that was before the electrical burns. Mirek had had someone bring him a med kit to speed up the healing, but it wasn’t a cryopod. It was going to take time.

So, actually, Thace could glare at him all he liked; Keith was going to give himself a damn break. "How so?" he asked.

Mirek rubbed the back of her neck, her claws catching on something metallic and grating at Keith’s ears. "Officially, nothing has changed, and the soldiers are here only to arrest an unspecified number of intergalactic criminals. No curfews have been imposed, and there are no rules against civilian gatherings or anything else that would suggest that the ordinary code of laws has been suspended." She paused, a wry twist to her lips. "You wouldn't know it looking around the 301, though."

"We noticed," Lance said. "It's creepy how quiet it is out there."

"People are scared. Fortunately, there haven't been any major raids yet. A few quiet strikes against our least secure locations. A small military presence at demonstrations--what few demonstrations are still going on now that Zarkon has his troops on the ground."

"So what's the plan?" Arel asked. "Go to ground?"

Keith sat up, scoffing. "Are you kidding? You're not going to wait this out. You need to fight back, or Zarkon's only going to tighten his grip."

Arel's ear twitched. "We can't--" He stopped himself, letting out a small growl, and turned to Mirek. "We're not set up for that kind of campaign-- _right?_ " He had the tone of someone who wasn't looking for confirmation so much as trying to prove a point by calling in the big guns.

Mirek, though, just sighed. "You're both right, unfortunately. Lieutenant Vit has been given command of the operation, and everything we've learned about him suggests that he's not going to pull out until the unrest in this city is well and truly stamped out--and maybe not even then. But Arel is correct in saying that we don't have the resources to meet him on equal footing. We have a few dozen defectors among our number, a handful of civilians with a certain amount of experience in the... less savory arts. But our strength has always been in organizing ordinary people, in navigating official channels and exploiting loopholes. We're aware that we're going to have to change tactics, but it's not yet clear what our best option will be."

"Focused strikes may be a good idea," Thace said. "With proper planning, a small number of skilled agents can bring an operation like this to its knees."

"I assume you're talking about yourself and your two companions," Mirek said.

Thace spread his arms. "We have always been frank about where our talents lie. It's up to you whether you want to take advantage of those talents, but given the situation, I imagine you don't have much of a choice."

"I don't suppose we do." Mirek dropped into a chair, the gears in her cybernetic limbs humming with the motion. "You can stay here for the time being. I'll speak with my comrades, and we'll let you know what we decide."

* * *

Val lost track of how long she spent with Eli working on the podcast. With so many techies on the castle-ship, not to mention Eli's AV experience, it didn't take long to get their setup working.

The content was another question entirely.

They had a holo board full of ideas that had been tossed around--by Eli and Val mostly, with the occasional suggestion from Sebastian, who stuck around long after everyone else had wandered off in search of their own entertainment. At one point, not long after the setup crew left, Val actually forgot he was there, huddled in an arm chair across the room, and she'd jumped when he interrupted her thoughts with a suggestion of a radio-drama-style fictionalized account of life on the Castle of Lions. To be fair, she also forgot about lunch until Hunk returned with a plate full of sandwiches, fruit, and a fresh batch of cookies--and an admonition not to miss dinner.

Sebastian had to remind them about dinner.

They were late, as it happened, and Nyma had skipped out early to take a shift sorting through distress calls and petitions from Coalition worlds. Which was... odd. They had a team of operators Coran had trained to sort through the calls for them, taking care of the ones that needed only a simple reply or were better off directed to the Coalition itself. Coran reviewed what remained twice a day to forward it to the Guard or one of the paladins.

"She thought I needed a break," Coran said with a laugh as he served himself up a second helping of potatoes. He glanced around the table, then leaned toward Val and lowered his voice. "I think she needed the distraction, if I'm being honest."

Val's heart clenched. "The message?"

Coran cut a chunk of potato in half with his spork and hummed, avoiding Val's gaze. "No word from Meri yet, either, I'm afraid. I don't think Nyma has ever been the type to sit and wait patiently."

"What was your first clue?" Val ate a few more bites, all too aware of her mother's eyes on her from across the table. She'd gotten a scowl when she walked in late, and had received a plate, already full to overflowing, of the night's offerings. Her appetite was gone now, but she knew if she tried to leave, she was going to get an ear-full. She'd been trying not to think about the message Nyma had received a few days ago, and whether or not the Delegate was telling the truth. Rolo and Commander Holt in the same place? It seemed too good--or too ominous--to be true. But there was nothing to be done until they heard back from Meri or one of the other agents of the Accords.

Val finished the meal mechanically, waited out just enough chatter not to seem rude, then quietly excused herself with a promise to Eli that she'd stop by tomorrow to help him narrow down their list of potential segments.

Then she made her way up to the bridge. Tev was on duty tonight, and he spared a smile for Val when she entered but otherwise kept to the fore station--well away from the grumpy paladin draped sideways across the chair to Val's right.

"I missed you at dinner," Val said, coming up behind Nyma and pressing a kiss to the side of her head. Nyma stilled, but allowed Val to wrap her arms around her shoulders. Val leaned down, peering at the screen, which Nyma had on an angle so she could read it in her odd position. "Coran said you tapped him out for the evening review."

"The man works too much," Nyma said. "And it was too loud for me."

Val cocked her head to the side. "Everything okay?"

"Headache." Nyma hesitated, tilting her face a fraction toward Val. "Don't you have more work to do? With Eli or in those books of yours?"

"Nah. I'm done for tonight. Need some down time." Val leaned forward, her chest pressed against Nyma's back, her hands running down Nyma's arms. "Can I keep you company?"

A smile finally slipped past Nyma's perpetual glower, and she sat up, making room for Val on her lap. Val was only too happy to oblige, making herself comfortable with an arm around Nyma's neck, her head resting on Nyma's shoulder, and her legs hooked over the arm of the chair.

"Is the radio show coming along, at least?" Nyma asked, dragging a file to the Black Lion's folder. A new one popped up in its place, and Nyma dragged it to the Guard icon after only a moment's consideration.

"Slowly," Val said, watching the motion of Nyma's hands. "But it's coming. Eli's already said that once we've got the ball rolling, he'll do the lion's share of the work."

Nyma paused, her fingers hovering an inch from the screen as she frowned down at Val, who sighed.

"Yes," she said. "That was a pun. I hate that they don't translate."

"Notice that it hasn't broken you of the habit yet."

"You know you love my puns."

"Mm. Debatable." Nyma was smiling, though, and Val smacked her shoulder. The smile grew, but Nyma remained stubbornly focused on the screen, though Val knew for a fact that sorting through these reports didn't require half so much attention as Nyma was giving them. It was simple, really. Shiro and Allura handled the political tangles and anything that looked like it might turn into a battle--they would need to do some more digging and decide whether they needed to call the Greens or Yellows back from their personal crusades. The Guard handled bureaucratic occupations and natural disasters--anything that was spread over a large area and needed bodies more than it needed firepower. And Val and Nyma handled prison breaks. In most cases, all you had to do was scan for a few keywords, then swipe it to the appropriate folder.

The long day, the low lights, and the heat coming off Nyma's body lulled Val, and she watched quietly as Nyma sorted through the last of the files. There was a budding quarrel between Iltair and Klyx, two of the Coalition's member worlds, over refugee placement--that was for the Blacks, definitely. Reports of a prison ship stationed over Vo II, which held a couple of political prisoners and was putting the brakes on the local revolution. Val barely had a chance to read two sentences before Nyma was sliding that one over to the little Blue Lion head in the upper right corner. An electrical storm (Val assumed that meant something worse than an ordinary thunderstorm) on N'terru that was causing widespread disruptions in their defenses. Guard.

After a few more reports, Val began to doze on Nyma's shoulder, and she soon gave up on reading the reports altogether. The motion of Nyma's arm kept a steady rhythm, and Val let it carry her. At least until it stopped.

Val opened her eyes, blinking away sleep. She'd assumed Nyma had finished sorting through the reports, but no. There was one still up, and Nyma was just staring at it.

Must have been a complicated one, if it was taking her so long to make a decision. Val squinted until the words came into focus. It was a distress call from an anonymous sender on the planet Ryloss--not a name Val recognized, but she was way behind on her Coalition trivia. _The Galra established a new prison in the heart of the capital, and people are being arrested for all sorts of tenxshit reasons. People are scared to leave their houses. We need help._

Val exhaled, sitting upright to read the rest of the report, but before she could, Nyma finally made her decision, sliding the file into the Guard folder.

"Hold on," Val said, her voice thick with sleep. "Wasn't that a prison?"

"Don't worry about it," Nyma said. She swiped the next file to the Blue folder, then switched off the monitor. "Done."

Val frowned, even as she let Nyma prod her into standing. "But don't we usually do the prison breaks? Why'd you send it to the Guard?"

"I said don't worry about it." Nyma stood, glaring at Tev, who had turned toward her outburst. Scowling, she headed for the door.

Val watched her go, her tired mind trying to make sense out of Nyma's bad attitude. "Is... something wrong?"

Nyma stopped in the doorway, her shoulders going rigid. "Don’t," she hissed.

"But--"

"Just... _Don’t_ _._ "

Nyma left without another word.


	36. Visions Fulfilled (Part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Lance and Keith are back on the Galra homeworld and back in touch with the resistance, who's struggling under the pseudo-military rule headed up by Arel's twin brother, Lieutenant Vit. Meri has secured her place as Reza ve Orahk, a druid trainee, aboard Haggar's flagship, the _Eryth_.
> 
> And once, nearly fourteen years ago now, Meri woke from stasis to a vision from Blue. A vision of her new paladin and the path he might walk. A vision of pain, and of an offered trade--his life for Keith's.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It has been well over a year since I published _Kiss, Fake it Better,_ at this point, so I don't blame you if you don't remember it in any detail. If you'd like to refresh your memory of the vision referenced in the chapter summary, it starts about halfway through chapter two, [found here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11632725/chapters/26235357). (Relevant section starts with, "The boy, now grown.") You should be okay to read this chapter without that refresher, but it's there if you want it. :)

_"Lord Zarkon has spoken."_

_The voice slithered out of the shadows, seeming to come from all sides. A flash of yellow from behind, a stab of pain in her side. She turned, searching the ring of faces--faces? It seemed she was being watched, but she could see nothing through the shifting shadows to confirm or deny the itch beneath her skin._

_Someone lay on the ground behind her, their breath echoing all around, and the voice seemed to grow out of that pained gasping, ringing in her ear._

_"The traitor's life is forfeit."_

* * *

Val woke with a stranger's voice still ringing in her ears, but the dream didn't seem to want to let her go. It played out behind her eyelids as the rest of her senses settled back into the waking world. Sheets twined around her legs. An alarm blared somewhere to her right. Her mouth tasted sour from the over-filtered castle air.

And in her mind, Lance smiled, blood beneath his fingertips and a pistol in his hand. He spoke words that didn't reach Val's ears, then fired a single shot into the encroaching darkness.

The dream released her with an electric jolt, and she drew in a shaking breath, reaching up to push her hair out of her eyes. It was getting long again, and it clung to her neck in sweaty waves as the sheets stuck to sweaty legs. She tossed the covers back and shivered as the cool morning air rushed in.

 _What the hell was that?_ she wondered, dragging herself upright. She fumbled with the alarm until it shut up and lamented another night of not enough sleep. She'd tried to go to bed on time last night, she really had. But then she'd started in on _Quintessence Theory_ again, and the next thing she knew three hours had passed and the words were blurring together on the page.

Weird-ass dreams about Lance wasn't help matters any.

She grabbed her personal comm to check whether anyone had sent her a ping overnight--they hadn't, but she was sure there were plenty of potential missions waiting for her in the inbox she shared with Nyma on the main server. A yawn slipped out of her, and she leaned back against the wall, navigating idly to her contacts and pulling up Meri's before she realized what she was doing.

Wrinkling her nose, Val closed out of the messenger and tossed the comms unit aside. What did she think she was going to accomplish, sending a message to Meri's private frequency? She hadn't taken any Altean tech with her when she left to spy on the Empire, and every message she'd sent since had come through one of the Accords' secure channels.

Something about the dream still tugged at her, something to do with Meri. It was Lance's face she'd seen at the end there, but... maybe Meri had been the person on the ground behind him?

She tossed an arm across her eyes and heaved a sigh. Like any other dream, the details were already slipping from her mind, though she doubted they'd made much sense to begin with. With Lance and Meri both off fighting the Empire where Val couldn't help, it was only natural she'd have stress dreams about them.

That's all it was, though; a dream. So she shoved it out of her mind and dragged herself out of bed, off to start another day.

* * *

Meri woke already on edge--a side-effect of the Quintessence injections, maybe. Difficult to say, since she'd been on edge almost without stop since arriving on Haggar's flagship, the _Eryth_.

It was funny, but living down the hall from the most sadistic, homicidal woman to ever live had a tendency to make a person uncomfortable. Lying to her face even more so.

The dreams, at least, had left her alone last night, aside from a vague malaise that clung to her as she got up and got ready for the day. There had been no images to go with the sense of dread, just an indistinct pain and a tightness in her chest and the sense, when she woke, that something terrible had just happened.

Unfortunately, she didn't have the luxury of listening to her gut. She had a personal appointment with Haggar in less than an hour, and she needed to be ready. She couldn't afford to be anything but at her very best when dealing with the witch.

She dressed, checked her shift, checked her Quintessence injector, forced down a few bites of a ration bar, then headed out to her appointment. She'd been on the _Eryth_ only a few weeks, but she'd familiarized herself with the druid complex quickly, finding excuses to explore every nook as soon as they became available to her. Most of what she found turned her stomach--prisoners and test subjects, or sometimes merely their remains. Records rooms full of testaments to the sick work that went on behind closed doors. Empty rooms that reeked of fetid Quintessence used for perverse rituals.

Meri bypassed all of these now, heading instead directly to the room she'd heard some of the other druids call the _theater_. She'd thought at first that they meant an operating theater, or something of the sort, and in truth it did look like it had been designed for an audience. Antechambers looked out on the central space through one-way mirrors, like those in the interrogation chamber, and the high ceiling allowed for observation rooms on the officers' deck above the druids' complex, in case Haggar felt like showing off for military types who didn't have the clearance to enter the complex proper.

The room itself was simple: an apparatus in the center that could be configured to hold a prisoner in various positions, with or without restraints. Other devices and tools were brought in on hovering carts when a procedure required them, but otherwise it was just the prisoner, the blinding lights overhead, and their own reflection staring back at them from every angle. The corners of the room were steeped in shadows that might have served a purpose in the psychological warfare the druids so excelled in.

Haggar was alone in the room when Meri arrived, standing beneath a spotlight with her arms at her side and her eyes glowing golden beneath her hood. She stared at nothing, and she gave no sign that she recognized Meri's presence, but her Quintessence had spread out to fill the room, prickling beneath Meri's skin like an invader. It gathered at the base of her skull, whispering in the dark corners where her conscious mind couldn't go.

Meri tucked her arms inside her sleeves and focused on her breathing, trying to chase away the lingering anxiety. She didn't have to be told not to disturb Haggar when she was in a trance. No one understood her magic, least of all her inner circle, but they all knew that if they disrupted a spell, they would pay the price.

Within a few seconds, Haggar came out of her trance, a smile stretching her face almost to breaking. That was something Meri hadn't realized until she saw Haggar up close: she seemed stretched thin, her skin almost translucent, her breath a death rattle. It might have been her age--a great many people on the _Eryth_ whispered about the magic or medical tricks she used to sustain herself--or it might simply have been the effects of druidic magic, but she seemed to exist with one foot already across the threshold of death.

"Reza," Haggar said with a smile. "My favorite new student."

Haggar's voice dripped sarcasm, and Meri affected disinterest as Haggar gestured her toward a computer terminal at the back of the room. She hadn't yet decided whether Haggar taunted her because she suspected Meri's deception, or only because she found Reza's bravado amusing.

Either way, it had earned Meri the witch's personal attention to a far greater degree than she had planned. She hated it, even as she relished the access it gave her to Haggar's personal work spaces. She would need that if she was going to get Ulaz his place on the Vindication team.

Haggar had pulled up the records for today's subject on the computer terminal, and Meri settled into her role as the lesson began.

Mind magics. Haggar's personal obsession, and the one she'd decided to impart to Reza for reason Meri hadn't yet discerned. Surely there were other, far more useful skills she could have taught. Surely there were others who could take over Reza's training.

But Haggar insisted on keeping her close. Said she reminded her of an apprentice she'd had long ago. _She died, of course,_ Haggar had said once, while leading Meri through a dissection. _Too squeamish for the work we do. But she had potential, despite her weak stomach. I suppose we'll see if those same flaws hold you back._

Truth be told, Meri didn't have the stomach for this work. She found every second of it physically and morally revolting, but it was what she had to do. For her team. For the universe.

So she let herself be Reza ve Orahk, a druid as bloodthirsty as any other, and she followed Haggar's lessons with a hunger that haunted Meri's dreams.

She could use what she learned, she told herself. Not against prisoners, not even against ordinary soldiers, who couldn't defend themselves against magic like this. Against Haggar. After all, Reza ve Orahk was going to have to disappear eventually--and the sooner, the better. Meri had already decided not to bother trying to convince Haggar to hire Ulaz on his own merits. It would be far easier to sneak access to Haggar's computer and submit a transfer order of her own. Haggar oversaw so many projects that she wasn't likely to notice one extra surgeon reassigned to a distant lab.

Meri would be out of here soon, and when she went, she would wipe Reza out of existence, stripping her from Haggar's memories, and from the memories of the other druids, piece by piece, until nothing but a ghost remained.

* * *

"The 243 fell last night."

Lance let out a breath, sharp, as Mirek's words sank in. "Another one? Same thing as the others?"

Mirek nodded. "The resistance over there wasn't as strong to begin with, and the Imperials hit them hard right from the start. Arrested over a hundred people who'd gathered at a food production plant to protest cut corners in the refinement process. People have been getting sick, from what I've heard, and even when the food paste isn't contaminated, it's subpar. You need to buy twice as much not to starve."

"Goddamnit," Lance hissed. He glanced at Keith, who watched the conference from the back of the room. He was as concerned with the budding military state on the homeworld as anyone else, but he rarely had much to add to the discussion, at least on issues of the big picture. A single operation, certainly. Ask him to talk about Vit's latest dick move, and he'd rant for an hour.  The rest of the time, he was content to let Lance, Thace, and Mirek discuss the shape of the occupation and where it was likely to spread next.

Equally silent on the other side of the room was Arel, who listened to news about his brother's movements with growing dread and fear. It paralyzed him, held him back even when Lance knew he wanted to say something. He wasn't ready to admit that they had to fight back, but he'd stopped arguing against it.

"We need to put the brakes on their momentum," Lance said, looking to Thace for support. "The more cities they take, the harder it's going to be to kick them out."

"I agree." Thace leaned against the table that was the focal piece of this conference room. A map of the homeworld was projected above its surface, violet stains marking regions where Vit's forces had quelled resistance activities. "Peaceful protests and demonstrations are a valid strategy when the enemy is politicians and corporations."

"We don't have the numbers to face them in open war," Mirek pointed out. "We never did, and with this new offensive, we're hemorrhaging support."

“So…?” Lance prompted. “Have you talked with the other coordinators about our offer?”

Mirek’s ears twitched once, her cybernetic eye constricting as she studied him. “I have,” she said at length. “And we are in agreement: it’s time to change tactics.”

Lance uncrossed his arms as a thrill of adrenaline shot through him. "Good. Because I’ve been thinking. We need to take a stand. Create something the people of the 301 can rally around--and then, if we can make some progress pushing back against Vit and his forces, the 301 could become the rallying point for the rest of the cities."

Mirek studied him with sharp eyes. "You have something in mind?"

Lance caught Keith's eye and smiled. "We're paladins of Voltron, aren't we? I think it's time we stop hiding."

* * *

It had been nine days.

Rolo tried not to make a habit of counting days here in the lab. He had at the beginning, and each new landmark crushed him a little bit more. Disorientation from the experiments had made him lose track somewhere around the two month mark, which was probably for the best. He knew that Sam had been here for roughly a year, and that Rolo himself was racing toward that marker.

Knowing that in a broad sense was hard enough to stomach--nearly a year in this hell-hole. Nearly a year of occasional experiments and endless tests.

Nearly a year that Nyma and Beezer had been out there alone.

He hoped they were getting by all right.

It was still early on the ninth day, and Rolo had slept poorly once again. The cell felt colder without Sam in it, the guards closer. He'd spent an entire week scouring those areas of the base he could reach for signs of what they'd done to Sam. He'd found a few computers hooked up to the main network and had gone poking through the files for references to ongoing projects, but that had always been Sam's specialty.

He wasn't giving up, though. Sooner or later he'd stumble on something useful. Something informative, at least; he doubted anything much would be _useful_ while he was locked in here or suffocating beneath the watchful eye of the Sentinel.

The fatigue was as much because of the constant roaming as because of the fitful sleep, and Rolo knew it, but that didn't matter. He needed answers more than he needed sleep.

"How long have you been here?"

Rax’s voice was low, and Rolo was so deep in his plans for the day's search that he almost didn't hear the question. The last week--and the Quintessence levels in the lab--had done a lot for the damage wrought in attaching his cybernetic leg, but Rax kept up the routine of twice daily Quintessence healing. Rolo supposed that was his way of coping with this, and Rolo certainly wasn't going to protest--not unless it became clear that the cost to Rax outweighed the benefits Rolo gained.

The deep ache as Rax started working told Rolo that they weren't yet to that point. On the off chance an opportunity arose to do... well, _anything_ , he wanted to be ready.

"I try not to think about it, to be honest," Rolo said. "But I'm pretty sure I haven't hit a year yet."

"And before that?"

Rolo cracked an eye open to study the top of Rax's head. "I was a smuggler. What's with the sudden interest?"

Tensing, Rax ducked his head, keeping his gaze decidedly on his work. "It is nothing. Idle curiosity." He started to say something else but stopped himself, and for several moments, they both watched the soft blue glow of Quintessence that lit Rax's hands from within. At length, Rax pressed on. "You must prepare yourself for the possibility that he will not return."

Rax's massages were incredibly calming things. Despite the ache, Rolo always found himself melting beneath Rax's hands, his mind drifting. He thought sometimes he rested more in those few minutes than he did all night.

Just now, though, Rolo carried his tension close. He pushed himself up on his elbows and scowled at Rax. "Don't talk like that. Sam's tougher than you give him credit for."

"And the Empire excels at crushing those who think themselves strong." Rax's voice had an edge to it that was more grief than venom, and that was the only thing that stayed Rolo's tongue. "Hope is... It is a dangerous thing, when one finds oneself at the mercy of the Galra."

"Hope is a weapon," Rolo argued. "One of the only ones we've got in here. If you want to lie down and take whatever beating they decide to hand out, that's fine by me, but I mean to go down swinging."

"And I mean to survive," Rax shot back. "And that means not placing the pistol in our captors' hands. Hope sets you up for despair."

Rolo let himself fall back to the floor, too tired to argue. "Agree to disagree, I guess."

Rax growled, but turned his attention back to Rolo's leg. "You have lived this life for a year," he murmured. "I have lived it for twenty. Do not mistake your approach for one I have never seen before."

Rolo screwed his eyes shut, shoving Rax's words away. He knew the risks of optimism all too well. A guy could only handle so many disappointments before it got to him. But was it any better to steep yourself in misery from the start? At least this way, Rolo had a fighting chance. At least this way he could work up the energy to try to find a solution.

He needed to hope. He needed to believe that there was something waiting on the other side of this war besides death and destruction.

So he left Rax and his cynicism behind and went to go root around in the computers again.

He would turn up something useful one of these days.

* * *

"We're still waiting on that intel on the _Krevni_ line, right?" Val asked.

"Assuming it's coming."

Val gave Nyma a frown. They were holed up in one of the comms bays, going through their messages for the day and trying to sort out priorities. Val's nightmare had stuck with her, and she was fully prepared to admit that was part of the reason she was so reluctant to leave the room in search of more comfortable--or more secure--quarters. She wasn't exactly expecting a message from Meri or Lance, but she wanted to be close just in case something did come through.

What she didn't know was why Nyma was in such a sour mood.

"I didn't realize you had such a personal vendetta against Keith's mom," she said lightly, turning her attention back to the files Coran had sent them. The _Krevni_ were a line of prison ships stationed throughout the Greater Chettok Galaxy, one of Zarkon's more recent acquisitions. The war for control of the galaxy had lasted two hundred years, with the last holdouts falling less than a decade before Voltron's return. There were still a lot of rebels in the area, and a lot of ex-resistance soldiers being held in the _Krevni_ line.

Coran's intel identified fourteen individual ships, though he only had coordinates for two of them. The Accords were supposed to be filling in the gaps and providing any additional specs they could find that might help the paladins narrow down their first target.

The way Val figured, if they hit a couple of the bigger ships first, the prisoners might very well turn around and help out with successive raids. Free enough rebels and they should be able to get in touch with the ones who'd evaded capture. Val couldn't say that retaking the Greater Chettok would become the new priority at that point, but it certainly seemed more feasible than any other large-scale campaigns she'd heard proposed so far. Mostly they'd been retaking individual worlds and solar systems. Sometimes a small cluster of stars that was interdependent.

If they could retake an entire _galaxy_...?

Well, Val thought Nyma should be a little bit more excited about it.

"All I'm saying is, we're grounded until we get that intel," Nyma said. "If some people would just do their jobs, maybe we wouldn't be stuck twiddling our thumbs."

Val held up her hands. "Hey, don't look at me. I'd just as soon be out there, too."

Nyma rolled her eyes. "Are you sure you wouldn't rather be reading your books some more? Seems like that's all you do anymore."

Guilt sucker-punched Val in the gut, making her words stick in the back of her throat for a long moment. "I already apologized for that," she said at length, wrapping her arms around her knees. The guilt curdled in her stomach, turning to something sharper, and she couldn’t keep the snark from her voice as she went on. "Excuse me for trying to bring Rolo home."

Nyma stiffened, and Val immediately wished she could take back those words. She was just so tired.

But Nyma said nothing, did nothing—didn’t even glance Val’s way—and Val was afraid to break the fragile silence hanging between them. One wrong move and she feared they’d descend into an all-out cat fight, which was the last thing Val wanted.

So she stayed where she was, her feet up on the seat of her chair, and clicked through the last few messages, her mind a million miles away.

"Sorry." Nyma's voice was subued, soft enough that Val nearly mistook it for the hum of the electronics around them. Surprised, Val turned toward Nyma, who rubbed the side of her neck and stared fixedly at the far wall. "I don't know why I'm being such a bitch today. Not enough sleep, I guess."

Val had already opened her mouth to tell Nyma she wasn't being bitchy, but she hesitated, something cold seeping into her gut. "Trouble sleeping?" she asked.

Nyma let her head fall back against her chair. "No, just some weird-ass dream. It's stupid."

"You... didn't happen to dream about Lance, did you?"

Nyma froze, and the cold feeling in Val's gut spread. "Yeah, actually," Nyma said. "He was hurt."

"And Meri was there, maybe, except not really?"

Pressing a hand to her face, Nyma breathed out a curse. "Are you shitting me? We had the same dream?"

"I haven't been able to get it out of my head, either," Val admitted. "You don't think....?"

Nyma scoffed, but she didn't actually refute Val's unasked question. Val was well aware how crazy it sounded. Lance and Meri were whole galaxies apart. Even if that had somehow changed, even if something had gone catastrophically wrong on the Galra homeworld... wouldn't they have heard something about it by now?

So, then, what? Was this some sort of prophetic dream? Val would have dismissed the idea at once, except that Nyma had had the same dream, and it involved the other two blue paladins.

Val bit her lip and caught Nyma's gaze. "It's probably nothing..."

"Probably," Nyma agreed, but she stood, pulling Val to her feet as she headed for the door. "Let's go talk to Blue. I'm sure she'll just say we're being paranoid, but at least we'll know, right?"

"Right." Val squeezed Nyma's hand and didn't comment when Nyma squeezed back.

* * *

It felt odd to be in paladin armor again, even after just one week on the homeworld. Keith had gotten used to hiding. He never went out without his mask or hood, he never used his bayard for fear of tipping off the IP. Secrecy was important, Thace had explained, especially when it was just the three of them. The 301 hadn't been in open revolt until now. There had been a threat of violence, but the people were angry enough that the IP had to watch their step. Thace had been worried that interference from the paladins of Voltron would prompt them to rash action.

They didn't have to worry about that now. With Vit in charge, violence had taken root in the city. Anyone caught engaging in rebellious activities was shot on the street and left to die. Those whose connection was only suspected were arrested and taken to secure facilities. Keith didn't hold out much hope for humane conditions inside those walls.

So they were done hiding. Mirek had lost more than half her supporters, either to Imperial raids or to a well-founded fear for their own safety--and that of their friends and family.

Adrenaline pounded in Keith's veins as he got dressed, mentally checking to see if Matt was using the bayard. Keith still had his sword and dagger, but the bayard was a statement as much as the armor. Lance had said they were putting on a show, so Keith would put on a _show_.

To that end, they'd made one modification to their armor: a Galran sigil, painted in red between the arms of the V on their chests. _Neza_ , 'freedom,' the symbol of the _Nezai_.

"Ready?" Lance asked as Keith joined him on the second floor. They'd had to return to the Red Lion for their armor, three days ago now, and Thace had found them an empty corner store to use as a base while they prepared.

Keith felt a rumble in his chest that said Red was alert, and waiting for his signal. She'd taken offense to the notion that she wouldn't be part of this fight, no matter how many times Keith tried to tell her that there were just too many people in the 301. They were risking enough collateral damage just by picking a fight.

"Ready." Keith summoned his bayard and drew the deactivated hilt of his usual sword, an energy blade Thace had found for him at a black market weapons shop. "What's the target?"

The slow smile that spread across Lance's face promised trouble even before he said, "Where else? We're going right for the heart of Vit's operation. The Kral Mestna."

* * *

For once, Allura had nothing to do.

No diplomats waiting on her call, no attacks on allied space, no fires within the castle-ship to put out. They'd had a run of bad days lately--doubly so with the Guard down on pilots and on ships. Akira and Lieutenant Commander Layeni were running themselves ragged training the new recruits, running missions, and keeping abreast of the injured pilots' recovery. Some were lucky enough to go back to active duty straight out of the cryopod, but others needed physical therapy and more than a few were trying to cope with the psychological scars of the battle.

But there had been no new distress calls for three days now, which gave the paladins time to catch up on the ones they'd had to push back. Allura woke early, expecting another day of chaos and stress, and when she found her inbox empty except for a notice from Coran that he would be unavailable all day as he got with the medical and administrative staff to review applicants for the therapist position. (Multiple positions now, if Allura wasn't mistaken. Not only because of the number of people who needed help, but because of the number of species represented. At a minimum, Coran wanted experts in human, Altean, and Galra psychology on staff to train and consult with their colleagues.)

After reading Coran's memo, Allura closed out of her inbox. She meant to go see the refugees, or perhaps to check in with Val and the Holts on their research progress. Allura wasn't an expert in Quintessence, but if there was even a small chance her knowledge could help, she would gladly offer it.

She didn't move from the bridge station, however. Her eyes trailed over to the secure communication line. There were no new messages, of course. Nadezda had provided an update several days ago in response to Coran's inquiries, but it had given them nothing of substance.

Allura checked anyway. She wasn't sure what she was expecting--that Meri had sent a message through, and the computer just hadn't flagged it? Messages on the Accords' channels were given the highest priority. If no one was on the bridge to open it at once, it was delivered to Allura, Shiro, and Coran directly.

There was no new message, of course.

Allura couldn't help her disappointment.

Still restless and now frustrated, as well, Allura switched off her display screen and left the bridge with only a curt nod for the two women on duty. Familiar faces, but no one Allura yet knew by name. Coran had recently expanded the bridge staff to alleviate the burden on Tev and Zelka. He'd justified the decision to have two crew members on duty at all times--three once he'd finished the next round of hiring--as a precaution against surprise attacks, but Allura suspected it was primarily a safeguard against spies.

There was no progress on that front, either. A few more complications in missions that might suggest the enemy had known of their plans but might also indicate simple bad luck. A handful of Guardsmen and castle staff flagged for monitoring in a private server that only Coran, Akira, and the paladins had access to, and only from inside the saferoom. Akira had named the pilots with considerable reluctance, despite repeated assurances that they were only being watched, and that no action would be taken against any of their suspects until they had concrete proof.

Perhaps she should spend the day looking for such proof, as long as she didn't have anything else to do.

Allura changed course, heading to the security core to obtain a copy of the security footage from the last several days. Then she headed for the saferoom, letting thoughts of Meri fade to the periphery as the issue of the spy reasserted itself. There had been no disasters they could definitively link back to the spy. Suspicion, yes. Shiro thought the robeast in the Zhek Chain battle had been launched too precisely to be explained any other way. The Empire must have been informed of the Guards' activities, he argued, or the initial patrols had deliberately failed to report its approach. There was no other way it could have gotten so close to the population centers before someone noticed it.

But there was no proof, just as there was no proof that the spy had access to anything truly valuable. That didn't stop the paranoia. Most business was conducted in the saferoom these days; Allura had even caught Val and Pidge in there discussing ways to track down Pidge's father.

Anywhere on the castle-ship might be bugged. Anyone might be working for the enemy.

They needed to identify the spy, before the suspicion tore the castle apart.

Allura pressed her palm to the saferoom door lock, then leaned forward for the retinal scan. Another system sampled her Quintessence as the scanner did its work, and the door finally opened to admit her. She placed her comms unit in a storage locker in the antechamber--it would have no signal within the saferoom, anyway, and they'd all agreed it was better not to risk any more tech than was strictly necessary.

To her surprise, another locker already glowed red to indicate it was in use, and she waited impatiently for the room to scan her for any other tech. She logged the datastick containing the security footage, then strode into the room.

Akira was already there, entrenched at one of the computer stations around the perimeter of the room. Unlike the main computer embedded in the conference table at the center of the room, these terminals were designed to review unsecured files. Pidge had been adamant about redundancy within the saferoom. The computers were kept separate from the castle's main network, the room had its own power supply, the walls were shielded against wireless signals--but these computer terminals went a step beyond that, even. None of them were linked, either to each other or to the central computer. They contained a holographic projector, in case anyone wanted to share with the group, but were otherwise self-contained. And they automatically quarantined any external files that were loaded, which were then erased at the end of the session.

Pidge wasn't leaving any room for spyware to take root.

"Allura, hey," Akira said, turning toward her as she crossed the room. "Distress call?" He moved as though to stand, but Allura waved him off.

"Nothing like that," she said. "I'm here to work on our spy problem, since the morning seems as though it's going to be quiet."

Akira chuckled, turning back to his screen. "I feel you there."

"Things are quiet for the Guard as well, then?"

"More like Layeni ordered me to take the day off."

Allura paused for a moment before she sat down, arching an eyebrow in Akira's direction. "This doesn't seem like a day off to me."

A smile tugged at Akira's lips, but he quickly stifled it, yawning as he stretched his arms over his head. "I'm surrounded by responsible people," he said. "If I slack off, I'm just going to feel guilty."

Allura frowned, but said nothing as she loaded up the security footage. She understood where Akira was coming from--she'd felt that same pressure to live up to expectations. Her father had taken his duties as king very seriously, and he'd passed that on to Allura. Sitting still didn't come naturally to her.

But she'd seen the effects that could have. She'd pushed the paladins too hard when they'd first met, she'd seen them tired and stressed and snappish when the war didn't let them unwind. She'd even learned to take a break herself every now and again--though perhaps not as often as she should have.

She had no right to tell Akira that he was pushing himself too hard, though. Not only would it make her a hypocrite, she couldn't be sure how he would take it. They weren't strangers--not when they were both part of the command structure of the Castle of Lions, and especially not considering how close they both were to Shiro.

That was the problem, though, wasn't it? Outside of missions, Allura only every interacted with Akira by way of Shiro. Without him here, things were a touch awkward.

Akira seemed to feel it, too. He drummed his fingers on his arm rest, then leaned forward, refocusing on his work. Allura considered asking him what he was doing, then decided against it. It was none of her business, really, and she already had hours of work ahead of her digging through security footage. She could have the computer narrow her search based on images of the suspects, but that was still a lot of time to wade through.

The silence between them was stifling, though, and it strangled Allura's concentration. It shouldn't be so difficult to talk with Shiro's brother. Not when she'd seen so much of him in Shiro's mind.

Though... perhaps that was why this was so difficult. Allura felt as though she already knew Akira, but she was painfully aware that he knew very little about her. Shiro may have talked about her, she supposed. The rest of the team, as well. But that was a far cry from actual interaction.

She should have made more of an effort by now to get to know him. Never mind that they'd both been busy--first Akira with the formation of the Voltron Guard, then Allura with her training, and now both of them with a war that seemed determined to never let them breathe.

With a sigh, Allura pushed her chair back from the terminal. "Perhaps I'm more tired than I thought," she said, trying not to sound too much like she was putting on an act. "It shouldn't be this difficult to focus. I think I'm going to take a short break. Would you like to join me, or should I leave you to your work?"

Akira turned, his faint smile letting her know her act had been more transparent than she had hoped. She cursed herself. She could lie to a politician's face, play act at camaraderie for the sake of an alliance even if she found the topic of conversation revolting, but when it came to her personal life, all her old lessons scattered to the winds.

To her surprise, though, Akira left his computer station behind. "Eh, I could use a break, too, if I'm being honest. You have something in mind?"

"Castle's Flight?" she suggested. "I'm not sure if you've played that before."

Akira shook his head. "Takashi's mentioned it, I think? Card game?"

Allura nodded. "There should be a deck in here somewhere, if I'm not mistaken. It's Coran's favorite. Meri's, too, actually, but that's just because she's so good at bluffing."

That startled a laugh out of Akira, though he swallowed it quickly as they relocated to the small lounge off the main chamber. Coran had included it in the design mostly because of the long hours he and Pidge had pulled while they were building this place. Before the security systems were fully up and running, it had been an ordeal to get in and out of here, so they'd often opted to take breaks where they were. The Castle's Flight deck had migrated in because of that, because however much Pidge protested that Coran was a cheat, their competitive streak ran a mile deep, and they never turned down a challenge.

Now the lounge frequently went unused, though it was nice to have somewhere to get away from strategy sessions or marathons at the computer reviewing confidential files and scouring security footage for hints to the spy's identity.

"Sorry," Akira said as Allura joined him, claiming the second arm chair and extending the table from its compartment in the wall. "I was just remembering how we met."

"You and Meri?" Allura asked. She remembered hearing that Meri had been working with the paladins' families on Earth, trying to keep them safe while interfering with Vanda and Iverson's plans. She'd never thought to ask for details.

Akira hooked his leg over the arm of his chair as Allura dealt the first hand. "She went by Naomi Smith back then. Don't tell her I said this, but I still think of her as Naomi more often than I should, considering how skeptical I was of everything she said."

"Oh?" Allura cocked her head to the side. "I could never tell when she was lying."

"That was what was so frustrating," Akira said. "I thought she had to be lying about something, because who shows up out of nowhere with so much information and no qualms about helping a bunch of strangers try to take down a government organization? The problem was that she _didn't_ seem like she was lying. And all the things I thought had to be made up turned out to be the things she was being completely level about."

"Like aliens?" Allura asked. She laid the first card and started to explain the rules for Akira's benefit, but she only made it half way before he selected a card from his hand and showed it to her.

"Does this one work?"

Allura gaped at him, then snapped her mouth shut and narrowed her eyes. "Perfectly," she said. "I take it Shiro explained the rules to you already?"

"Nah. I just liked the way it looked. And, yes. I was convinced Nao--Meri was wrong about the aliens. Lying, or just delusional. Shows how much I know."

Humming, Allura sketched out the rest of the round for Akira, then played another card.

"I'm halfway convinced she was deliberately tipping her hand, honestly," he said distractedly, looking through his cards. "She was wary about giving herself away when she was working under the Empire's nose, but she had to have known she was running out of time, right? I have to wonder how much longer she would have lasted before she turned Altean in front of us just to put our skepticism to rest." He tossed a card out, glancing to Allura for confirmation, and she sighed as, once again, she saw that he'd perfectly countered her last move.

"If I didn't know this room was shielded against comms, I'd think you had Coran telling you what to play," she said, well aware she was pouting but unable to stop it.

Akira gave a guilty grin and shrugged. "It’s not Coran.” His inflection nearly turned the statement into a question, and he fidgeted under Allura’s scrutiny. “Okay, full disclosure: I’m probably cheating.”

“Probably?” Allura asked, unsure whether to laugh or scowl. “Aren’t you sure?”

Scratching the back of his neck, Akira shrugged. “I’m not sure about anything, to be perfectly honest. It’s… It’s Red? I think."

Allura forgot her irritation at once and sat up a little straighter, setting her cards face-down on the table. "The adjunct bond?"

Akira nodded. "I don't really understand it, but it's easier to recognize when she's giving me a nudge in little things, like card games. I figure if I practice when there's no pressure, I'll stand a better chance of putting it to use when it actually matters."

"If her domain is instinct, I wouldn't think you would _need_ to practice."

"Except that my own instincts aren't as good as Red's, and in the heat of battle I can't stop to sort out what's what. Either I follow all my impulses or none of them."

Intrigued, Allura picked her hand back up and grinned. “So, then. Shall we get back to training?”

Akira blinked, then grinned, and they resumed their game. Allura didn’t explain the rules any further than she already had, instead letting Akira try to follow Red’s prompting. He wasn’t always accurate—in fact, he seemed to get less accurate the longer he took to consider his next move.

It was an interesting game of Castle’s Flight, to say the least. Allura gave up entirely on winning and instead began to play the most obscure moves she could find, just to see what Akira would do with them. After a few rounds, he started to pick up on the rules, which, ironically, led to a long slump in his performance that Allura thought might have something to do with him trying to reason out his moves, rather than going with his first instinct.

Or rather, _Red’s_ first instinct.

After twenty minutes, Akira began to grow distracted, staring blankly at his cards and only humming in response to Allura’s attempts at small-talk. Interestingly, he quickly returned to his initial trend of perfectly countering each of Allura’s moves, backing her into a corner a little more with each card he laid until she had no choice but to yield.

“Well played,” she said, her spirits far higher than they usually were after being so thoroughly trounced at this game. “Should I deal another hand?”

Akira’s fingers hovered over his cards for a long moment, his eyes staring at nothing. It took a few moments for him to refocus on her, at which point he hastily set his cards down, shook his head, and stood.

“No. Sorry, I—I should go...”

Allura's adrenaline kicked in as he turned toward the door, and she set the cards down to take Akira by the wrist. "What is it?" she asked. "Are you all right?"

"Fine," he said, shaking his head. "Sorry, I don't..." He pulled his hand out of Allura's, folding his arms over his chest to hide the tremor in his fingers. "I don’t know. I need to talk to Matt."

He had that far-away look in his eye again, the look he’d had for the better part of their game. Like he wasn’t looking at the world so much as through it.

Like the Red Lion was looking through him.

"I'll come with you," Allura said, standing. Akira, already halfway to the door, stopped to look back, and for a moment she thought he was going to protest. Then he nodded, and they hurried out of the saferoom, Akira pulling up Matt's contact on his communicator before he had both feet through the door.

Allura held her breath and prayed nothing had happened.

* * *

The Kral Mestna was as much a monument as a functional building. It towered over the surrounding buildings like a jagged violet crystal. Where the rest of the city was crisp lines and supremely practical, the seat of local government looked like a fixture of the land beneath their feet, its twisting shape reminiscent of the Vkullor's Spines, the mountain range that surrounded the wound made by the Vkullor attack thousands of years ago.

Keith had often found himself stopping to look at it, though only ever from a distance. The Kral Mestna housed not only the governor's offices, but the IP headquarters and those of other security teams in the 301. Most of what happened within was administrative work, but few places in the city were as well defended.

It was no surprise Vit had chosen to take over the Kral Mestna here and in the other domes. Just as the architecture made a statement to the surrounding city, anyone who worked there carried a certain amount of borrowed authority. It was, after all, a _kral mestna_ \--a local throne meant to evoke Zarkon's actual throne on his flagship, and those within functioned as his regents while his attention was on more important matters.

Keith, Lance, and Thace waited in the shadow of a building across the street, their cloaks drawn closed to conceal their armor until they were ready to make their move. Keith had to tip his head back to see the distant peak of the Kral Mestna, and he drummed his claws on the hilt of his sword as Thace spoke with their support team.

"Security has to be tight in there," Keith warned, glancing to where Lance stood, watching over Thace's shoulder as one of Mirek's people sent them the floor plan. "Are you sure you're going to be okay on your own?"

Thace raised one hand in a pacifying gesture that did little to alleviate Keith's nerves. It was strange to even be so nervous; usually once he had his mind set on something he could forget about the risks and focus on doing his job.

Not so much today.

Maybe it was the knowledge that millions of people were counting on them. Maybe it was the Kral Mestna itself, living up to its reputation as the destroyer of courage. All he knew was that the three of them were in for a hell of a fight today. Mirek had given them what support she could--some of her soldiers were making strikes around the city, mostly at government facilities or in industrial areas where they were less likely to catch civilians in the chaos. With luck, it would draw out the IP and make things easier for Keith, Lance, and Thace.

What Mirek hadn't told her followers was that this wasn't about crippling Vit's operation--not yet. They simply didn't have the firepower for that. No, Mirek's people, and even Keith and Lance themselves, were only acting as a distraction so Thace could slip in without being stopped. His job was two-fold: to take control of the government broadcasts that forced propaganda onto every screen in the 301 so they could show the people of this city that the paladins of Voltron were on their side.

Secondly, and more important, he was going in to register his credentials with all Vit's systems. Doing so would give Thace access to everything--troop records, prisoner information, strategy notes, internal communication.

With luck, Vit would be so distracted by the flash of the battles and broadcasts that he wouldn't realize what Thace had done until it was too late.

Keith just had to kick up enough of a fuss to give Thace the opening he needed.

"Are we ready, then?" Lance asked as Thace switched off his comms unit and checked his gear.

Thace nodded. "I'll wait two minutes before moving in. Arel's camera drones will find you around that same time. You'll have to buy as much time as you can--ten minutes at a minimum, but longer is better."

Keith nodded. He'd heard all this before, but it was steadying to hear it again.

Ten minutes wasn't so bad.

"Good luck," Thace said, pulling his hood low and slipping off through the alley to get into position. Keith didn't know how Thace was planning on getting inside, but that was just as well. Thace was an expert at this sort of thing, and Keith didn't need to be worrying about all the details that might go wrong.

Keith waited until Thace's footsteps faded to silence, then unclasped his cloak and tossed it aside. "Okay," he said. "Let's give them a show."

"Wait." Lance grabbed him by the wrist, pulling him back, and Keith faltered, turning to search Lance's eyes for the problem. Before he could ask what was wrong, though, Lance pulled him into a kiss.

He broke away before Keith's mind could catch up with what was happening, then tossed his own cloak on top of Keith's.

"What was that for?" Keith spluttered, his ears quivering inside his helmet hard enough to make his scalp itch.

Lance only grinned a lopsided grin and summoned his bayard. He had two hand guns holstered at his hips as a safeguard, but for now a familiar blue rifle fell into his hands. "For luck," he said, heading for the alley's mouth. "I bet I can take down more sentries than you."

The challenge hummed in Keith's veins, and he flashed a grin as he charged after Lance. "You're on, Sharpshooter."

* * *

Rolo lost himself in the hunt. He made his usual rounds, visiting the wrecked lab where the druids had carried out the early stages of their experiments, then circling around to several other labs, none of which he'd ever seen in use. He passed through empty cells and storage rooms, passed close to the corridor that led, eventually, to one of the outlying domes.

The Sentinel's presence was stronger here, and Rolo felt invisible eyes on the back of his head. As always, he sensed nothing malicious from the presence. Awareness, yes. It felt as thought whatever it was was analyzing his movements, perhaps trying to find the advantage for when it decided to make its move.

Whatever the case, he gave it a wide berth. He didn't think it could reach him here, any more than he could reach it, but it was bad enough feeling the weight of its attention on him from a distance. Better not to get any closer than he had to.

After a time, he gave up on finding Sam. If he was still in the research complex, he was well beyond Rolo's reach. He tried to hold out hope for that--it was a large compound, and Rolo's reach was comparatively short. There was every chance that one of these days he'd stumble upon Sam himself making the rounds to try to find Rolo.

But there was only so much aimless wandering he could take. The monotony ate away at his optimism after a while, and the empty rooms gave him nothing to think about besides the Sentinel.

He returned to the block of offices he'd discovered earlier this week. He'd never seen it before that, which told him he was getting better at this, pushing himself farther than he'd gone before. It was mid-morning by now, and several offices were occupied by medical staff and one of the druids. Rolo paused in each room in turn, watching over shoulders to see what they were working on, but it was nothing of immediate use. Requisition forms here, payroll there, and in one case a mind-numbing article on synthetic Quintessence dosing in combination with severance.

Rolo stopped briefly behind the druid, who seemed to be playing a game of some sort. He wouldn't have thought it possible--a druid doing something as harmless and mundane as playing computer games.

(Then again, who else could play games in between torturing people and sending them to fight their own family?)

He moved on quickly after that, selecting one of the unoccupied rooms at random and slipping into the computer. Sam could glean a certain amount of information directly from the files, but Rolo had yet to master that trick. If he wanted to learn anything, he had to pull the files up on the screen and read through them the old fashioned way. Considering that left him searching more or less at random, it was slow going, and he had to wade through a lot of administrative files and old prisoner records--too sparse to tell him anything--before he found anything noteworthy.

Even when he did, it wasn't at all what he expected.

The first file he found was another prisoner record--Sam's this time. It contained only basic information--species (human), prisoner ID (119-9875), designation (green), and a Quintessence signature map that flew far over Rolo's head. He navigated to the containing folder, where the address bar gave him pause. 

> Research Initiatives > Vindication > Test Subject Profiles > Generation 3 > Group B

"Group B?" he whispered to himself. What did that mean? Were they building another set of robeasts out of the paladins' friends and family somewhere out there in the universe?

Rolo scanned the other files in this folder--Rax's and his own were to be expected, but the fourth one left his head spinning.

Zarkon.

 _Emperor_ Zarkon.

Rolo scanned the profile three times before he convinced himself that he wasn't misreading something. Zarkon had no prisoner ID, obviously, but every other line was filled in. His species, his Quintessence signature, his baseline vitals. He even had a designator--black--though Rolo didn't see anything that indicated what that meant. Each of them had a different one: green for Sam, blue for Rolo, and yellow for Rax.

Voltron colors, except there was no Red. Rolo told himself that it was a coincidence, even as his stomach turned over.

He moved up to the folder labeled Generation 3 before he could get too caught up in hypotheticals. Here, as expected, he found a second folder labeled "Group A," within which were four more files, each labeled only with a color: Black, Green, Blue, and Yellow.

Rolo opened the file labeled Blue with no small amount of trepidation, but it wasn't an ordinary prisoner profile he found.

 _Designator: Blue_  
Species: Niskaia  
Pilot: 986-9876

Rolo's own prisoner ID stared back at him, making his heart flutter. This was... the robeast? The Sentinel? He hadn't thought about the creation of the robeast. It was half machine anyway, and he'd assumed... Honestly, he'd assumed the point of linking him up to it was because he was the one who would animate it.

That wasn't right, though, was it? What else was the Sentinel, if not the sentience at the robeast's core? Rolo wasn't sure if that made it better or worse, what they were doing to him. Someone else had been turned into a monster, but at least that meant he didn't have to be, was that it?

Shaking, Rolo continued reading, trying to glean as much as he could. He wasn't sure if there was such a thing as reasoning with a robeast, but the more he knew about the poor soul inside it, the better off he was going to be.

Before he had a chance to get too far, his stomach gave a lurch, his vision going dim. He faltered, momentarily disoriented, before he recognized this as a side effect of someone moving his body while he wasn't in it. Cursing, he shut off the computer, hoping he would be able to find those files again, and let go.

He snapped back into his body so hard it felt like someone had kicked him in the gut him. He rolled over, coughing as his lungs struggled to draw in enough air, and tried to claw himself back together.

He sat up before he was ready for it, and the empty cell spun around him.

Empty.

Rolo's heart skipped a beat, and he held his breath, straining his ears until he caught the distant sound of retreating footsteps. _Vrekt._ They'd taken Rax.

Rolo tore himself out of his body to go after them, even though his Quintessence frayed at the edges as he did. Fatigue, panic, and nausea plucked at his concentration, but Rolo forced himself to focus.

They'd taken Rax. For the first time since Rolo and Sam had trashed the main lab, they'd taken Rax, and Rolo had a sinking feeling he knew what that meant. He'd never stretched himself as far as that distant lab with the metal coffin that linked him up to the Sentinel, but he would do it today if he had to. Damn him to Vkullor's eggsack, but he would rip himself to shreds so long as it meant being there for Rax.

After all, they only had each other now.

* * *

The Kral Mestna stopped breathing when Keith and Lance walked in through the front doors. The atrium was Imperial aesthetic through and through--dim violet light spilling from sconces on the walls, obsidian floor polished to a shine. The walls, reception desk, and information kiosks were all done in shades of black and gray, and the distant ceiling was dotted with magenta crystals no brighter than stars. Considering the severe Quintessence shortage plaguing the homeworld, it was an extravagant display, and a slap in the face to anyone who might have expected the Imperial Governor to actually look out for their best interests.

Lance fired three times at the ceiling to get the attention of everyone in the atrium--four receptionists at two desks, a handful of security guards and sentries, and ten business-types in military-cut suits. The blue-white flash of lasers lit up the room, but it was the nails-on-chalkboard screech of shattering crystal and the amethyst rain that really stole the show. People screamed, ducking for cover, then turned to look for the source of the attack.

Two paladins, aglow in their armor, must have made quite a sight--the white of their armor luminous in the almost blacklight glow of the sconces, the turquoise accents shining like beacons. If the stakes had been any lower, Lance would have stopped to bask in the raw power of his own presence, but instead he contented himself with a satisfied smile, then raised his rifle and took two shots at two sentries--the only ones, so far, who had made any move to stop the intruders. Both fell in sparking heaps as Lance's shots pierced their power cores.

"Don't mind us," Lance called, his voice echoing off the ceiling to shatter the crystalline silence. "We're just passing through. There doesn't need to be any trouble."

Keith hovered at Lance's shoulder, tensed but waiting. They'd agreed on one thing before they started: they hurt no one who didn't try to hurt them. Sentries were fair game, but everyone else needed to have a chance to get out of here in one piece. Even if they sounded an alarm, even if they called for security--Keith and Lance were here as a distraction, after all, so more attention was only a good thing.

Still, it was hard to make himself walk across the atrium, watchful for signs of an attack but not pulling the trigger. The security guards seemed to have decided they weren't getting paid enough to tangle with two of the Voltron Paladins, which was a fair decision. They were probably just trying to feed their families, anyway.

Keith reached the elevator on the far side of the atrium first, opened the door, and called an all-clear. Lance backed in, his rifle still pointed at the wide-eyed faces watching from behind desks and chunky pedestals that projected holographic building directories.

The door slid shut, and Lance let out a shaky laugh. "How's that for a first impression?" he asked.

"I'm sure Arel loved it," Keith said dryly, his head twitching like he was trying not to look up at the two drones buzzing around the upper corners of the elevator car. Lance hadn't noticed them join the procession, but it meant they were on track. Arel would edit the footage on the fly, and once Thace secured the public broadcasts, Lance and Keith's grand entrance would show up on every screen in the city.

Vit didn't have an official office in the Kral Mestna, but Lance figured he was probably just about enough of a dick to take the penthouse, so they were headed to the fifty-second floor. As long as they were putting on a show, they might as well go all the way, right?

They didn't make it all the way, of course. Just after the floor indicator flashed a thirty-nine, the car gave a jolt and stopped moving. Lance shot a look Keith's way, smiling at the way Keith's lips pursed, not in fear so much as exasperation. A moment later, the elevator started moving again--but they were headed back down, the numbers ticking away one by one.

Frowning, Keith pushed the button for the next floor down, but nothing happened.

"They want to pick the battlefield, do they?" Lance muttered. He nudged Keith with his elbow and glanced up.

Following his gaze, Keith smiled, then cut a hole in the ceiling in a few quick swipes. He dismissed his bayard, jumped up to catch the edge of the hole, and pulled himself through before turning to offer Lance a hand up.

The elevator car kept descending, but slowly enough that Lance had a moment to think. There were three other elevators in this bank, but if security could take control of one, they'd probably already shut down the rest as a precaution. There would still be the stairs, but it would be a long climb to the top floor--time they wouldn't be drawing the heat off of Thace's infiltration.

"Wait until we stop," Lance told Keith. "Then pry open the door of the next floor up. We'll catch them when they try to follow us."

Keith's bayard fell back into his hand, and he widened his stance to help him balance as the elevator continued to descend. Lance counted the floors as they passed, trying to recall the floor plans Mirek's team had pulled for them. Was there anything between the thirty-ninth floor and the atrium that would give Vit's forces an advantage? Unlikely. This place was basically just an office building that had been taken over by the military.

Sure enough, they made it all the way back to the ground floor before they slowed. Keith didn't wait for the last few inches; he wedged the tip of his sword into the seam where the doors met and pried the doors apart, holding them for Lance to duck through, then following.

Lance cursed as he took stock of their surroundings: a break room or vestibule of some sort, a few chairs scattered around and an abandoned desk opposite the elevator. Hallways stretched off to his left and straight ahead, but to the right was a tinted floor-to-ceiling window that stretched the full width of the atrium below, looking out over a sea of Imperial soldiers.

"What's wrong?" Keith asked, breathless. He was still facing the elevator doors, a sword in each hand in anticipation of a fight.

Lance hardly dared to move, afraid any motion might draw the attention of the army below. The window's tint should give them some cover, but as soon as the lasers started flying, all bets were off. "This... might not have been the best idea," Lance said with a feeble laugh. Keith twisted to frown at him, and Lance gestured toward the window with the barrel of his gun. "We've got an audience."

Keith's eyes widened. " _Vrekt._ Should we--?"

Shouts from beyond the elevator doors stopped his question in its tracks, and he swore again, looking to Lance for direction.

"Fall back," Lance said. "The hallway." He gestured to the hall that ran perpendicular to the window. It wouldn't be total cover from people in the atrium, but it would make them much harder to hit. Lance shoved Keith ahead of him into the hallway, stopping at the corner himself. A Galra dressed in the uniform of an Imperial solider shoved the elevator doors open, and several more soldiers poured out behind him.

Lance didn't wait for them to spot him. He shot twice, then ducked around the corner as they returned fire--and not only them, but a couple of panicked soldiers from the atrium who seemed not to realize it was their own allies in their cross-hairs.

Lance grinned at Keith, who scowled. "I hope you aren't going to try to count those ones."

"Why not?" Lance asked. "My plan, my credit." He continued to grin even as he let Keith shove him farther down the hallway. Keith himself stayed at the corner, waiting for soldiers to venture within range of his blades, while Lance picked off the ones who got wise and tried to hang back.

At the window--now shattered--someone was yelling. Lance liked to think they were cussing out their buddies down below for the friendly fire, but it was just as likely that they were calling for reinforcements.

Well, hey. As distraction went, this one wasn't half bad. They just needed to hold out for another ten minutes or so. And then make it to the front doors.

Somebody barked another command, and suddenly the soldiers at the corner backed off. Lance kept his rifle up, waiting for a charge. When it didn't come, he turned toward the itch on the back of his neck, checking behind them for another squad sneaking up to flank them.

"I don't like this," Lance muttered, backing up until his back met Keith's. "They're planning something."

"Any idea what?"

Lance made a frustrated noise. "No, but whatever it is, it's probably a bad idea to stay here."

"The window over there's already broken," Keith said, his shoulder moving in a way that told Lance he was gesturing toward the shattered glass. "It's not that big a drop. We could make it, easy."

"Yeah, and wind up in the middle of Vit's goons. No thanks." Lance wrinkled his nose. "There's a maintenance stairwell near the back of the building. I think I remember how to get there."

Keith hummed, dropping his voice low. "I thought we didn't want to make them search for us."

That was true, but Lance's neck kept itching with the same warning: they didn't have much cover where they were, but their mobility was limited. If Vit wasn't sending his people to swarm them until someone got through, then he must have a different plan. One Lance would rather not let go off without a hitch.

"Trust me," he said, and Keith relented at once, swinging around to take the lead. Lance kept watch behind them as he guided Keith toward the maintenance stairwell as best he could from memory.

They made it around two corners before the first explosion.

Lance froze, his heart in his throat as he automatically tried to locate the source of the blast. It might have just been his paranoia talking, but he thought it had come from the place where they'd been standing just a moment before. It rang in his ears, dust and smoke already filling the air even before the second charge detonated.

This one was closer--not directly below them, but close enough to knock Lance's senses awry as the world flashed white and the floor disappeared from under him. He landed hard in the rubble, head spinning, and his bayard disappeared in a flash of light. It was dark, a few shards of crystal giving off a pale light, something closer to sunlight straggling through the smoke that choked the air. It gave the room a surreal feeling, and Lance couldn't wrap his head around the shifting shadows.

_Danger._

Lance summoned his bayard, but a foot lashed out of the smoke and kicked it away. Lance cried out at the sharp pain, but it cleared his head enough to recognize Vit staring down at him, a snarl pulling at his lips.

Keith roared, charging out of the darkness at Vit. His energy blade glowed a vibrant magenta in the half-darkness, his bayard a silent shadow. Vit danced back, his spear spitting sparks as they clashed. Lance struggled to his feet, his heart stopping at the sight of soldiers and sentries--dozens of them--watching from the edges of the room, rifles up and ready to fire.

Lance's bayard had already begun to materialize, but he dismissed it before the process finished, going instead for the pistols at his hips. He drew them both and sprinted for cover. The soldiers opened fire as soon as he moved, but Lance had the advantage of aiming at an unbroken line of unmoving targets. He didn't stop to aim, but most of his shots found flesh anyway, shouts of pain chasing him to the conference table in the middle of the room. He dove under, using chairs for cover, and only then stopped to count the number of soldiers who had gone down.

Not enough.

Keith and Vit still dueled near the head of the table, ignored by the ring of soldiers, several of whom had started forward, trying to get a bead on Lance. He shot them in the kneecaps as they approached, then finished the job as they fell.

Keith's scream locked his joints, and he wasn't fast enough to take out the next guard, whose shot seared through his side, a flash of pain so intense Lance seized up, dropping one of his pistols as he clutched at the would.

_Keith._

Lance fired twice at the Galra who had shot him, then turned and scrambled for open air. He took in the scene in a moment: Keith, on the ground, curled in on himself, his eyes screwed shut in pain. He was still breathing; still conscious, Lance thought, though he wasn't moving. Vit stood over him, spearhead sparking.

With a roar, Lance charged forward. His bayard fell into his empty hand, taking the glaive form he'd used in the fight against a Haggar-controlled Shiro and Allura. He'd lapsed in his melee training, but a few of the drills Coran had taught him had sunk in, and he swung for Vit's neck, driving him back--but not before Vit retaliated, swinging his spear in an arc that caught Lance's thigh, slicing through the undersuit above his armor.

Lance stopped just in front of Keith, letting the bayard fade back into nothingness as his side twinged and his leg burned. Blood seeped down his leg beneath his armor, but he stood firm, pistol in his right hand, left pressed against the burn in his side. The soldiers around the room closed in, their movements tugging at Lance's focus, their eyes burning coals in the corner of his vision.

"It doesn't have to end like this," Vit said, lowering his spear. "I have no interest in Voltron's fight. I'm here to bring order to the homeworld."

"Right." Lance scoffed. "So, what? You're just going to let me go?"

"Of course I am," Vit said. He stepped back, relaxing his stance, and for just an instance, Lance's resolve wavered. "I'll order my men to stand down. You can walk out of here, go back to wherever you've hidden your ship, and leave the planet. I won't even send someone to chase you."

Lance tightened his grip on his pistol, suspicions raging as he glanced around the room. "And, what? I'm supposed to believe you're doing this out of the goodness of your heart?"

"Not at all," Vit said, his smile growing. "This isn't a gift, Paladin. It's a trade. I will let you leave. You have my word." He paused, and Lance's heart sank as he swept the tip of his spear toward Keith. "All you need to do is let me have the traitor."


	37. Visions Fulfilled (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Keith and Lance played the distraction at the Kral Mestna, the government building Vit has made his headquarters in the 301. They were supposed to buy a little time for Thace to gain access to the computer network (both to build in a back door and to take over the public broadcasts so Arel could show the people of the homeworld that Voltron fights for them.) Vit blew a hole in the floor, dropping them down into an ambush, where Vit offered Lance's freedom in exchange for Keith's life.
> 
> Meanwhile, Val and Nyma had dreams of the confrontation, matching a vision Blue once showed to Meri. Once they realized they'd had the same dream, they headed for the Blue Lion in hopes of figuring out what's going on. Meri and Akira are also feeling the effects of the battle on the homeworld.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warnings for this chapter: Major character injury. Blood and burns are described, but not in particularly graphic detail. Explosions occur in several places in the chapter. Emotions are running high throughout, and several characters are walking the edge of a panic attack. Brief reference to past character death (Lealle's) in a visceral but non-graphic way (skip the italicized section that starts, "The pain hit her first," for the worst of it, though it does come up again a few more times through Val and Nyma's sections.) Also sort of a near-drowning in the scene that starts, "Val hit water."

Nyma had barely stepped into the cockpit of the Blue Lion before the vision hit.

In an instant, she was somewhere else, a sharp pain in her side and blood dripping down her leg. In the darkness, she could only make out a few details: pinpricks of light that suggested watching Galra all around; something that crackled like lightning in the hands of the figure standing before her.

She'd been here before.

She only had time for that singular thought before she was back in Blue's cockpit, sprawled across the floor with a pounding headache and a stitch in her side like she'd just sprinted the full length of the castle-ship. Val was on the ground beside her, though she seemed to have landed a little more gracefully. She was pale and wide-eyed, and Nyma didn't have to ask to know she'd seen the same thing: eerily similar to the dream Nyma had had last night but infinitely more immediate.

"Shit," Nyma muttered, standing and sprinting for the pilot's seat. Val followed, and they'd hardly slid into their seats before they were tumbling into darkness once more.

* * *

"Observe." Haggar raised her hands, cupping them on either side of the prisoner's head. Blackness gathered in her palms, oily and oozing in a way that pricked at Meri's eyes. Her stomach turned over at the sight, but even if Haggar's attention wasn't on her directly, she was still aware of the room--she always was. A grimace, a flinch, even a change in breathing might tip her off to Meri's emotional state.

So she watched, stone-faced, and sank deeper into the cold shell of Reza ve Orahk. They'd moved on from simply viewing another mind to actively attacking it. This was a technique Meri wouldn't use against anyone, even Haggar herself. It dealt unpredictable, irreparable damage to the victim's psyche, and even the lightest touch could prove fatal--to either party.

The one saving grace was that Reza was forbidden from practicing this technique herself for the time being, and probably for some time to come. Haggar saw potential in her, and she didn't want to lose an asset to a beginner's mistake.

The door at the back of the room slid silently open, and one of Haggar's other pupils entered. The woman, Elhete, was tall and sinewy, even for a druid, distinctive even behind her blank white mask. Elhete was one of Haggar's senior pupils, and everything Meri heard in the druids' passive-aggressive gossip chain suggested she'd played dirty to gain seniority in the program. She had her eye on the most prestigious assignments, and apparently Meri forcing her way into the circle reeked of a challenge.

Meri frankly didn't give two shits about Elhete or her vendetta, but she had to watch herself when Elhete was around. There was nothing she wouldn't do to shoulder Reza out of the program.

That eerie mask turned fractionally toward Meri for a moment, but Elhete remained silent as Haggar worked. Elhete occasionally appeared during Meri's lessons to deliver a message to Haggar or inform her of changes with the prisoners, and she knew better than anyone not to distract Haggar while she worked.

The darkness continued to gather in Haggar's hands, snapping at the air like a creature trying to break free until, all at once, she forced it into the prisoner on the table. They were sedated, but they twitched at the influx of magic, their brow furrowing and the gill-like flaps on their throat fluttering in a way that spoke to pain.

Meri felt sick.

In the next moment, it turned into something more. Her nausea redoubled, her skin going clammy. The edges of her vision darkened, and her head felt stuffed full of cotton. She watched Haggar work with a peculiar detachment--the demonstration, the very room itself going out of focus like a holoscreen that needed recalibrating.

Something was wrong.

Something…

Something somewhere else.

Something she'd felt before.

Elhete's head swiveled, turning again toward Meri, and even with the mask shrouding her features, she positively reeked of satisfaction. Like a predator scenting blood, she watched, and Meri shoved back at the sense of impending doom trying to rip her out of her body. She curled her hands into fists inside her sleeves, shifting her claws minutely longer to dig more deeply into her palms.

The pain grounded her, and as she settled back into her body, the nausea faded to something she could hold at bay.

She had to get through this lesson.

Whatever was happening, somewhere else out there in the universe, it would just have to work itself out without her input. There was nothing she could do until she got a chance to slip away and search out the source of the strange sensation. If she could even do that much.

For now, she watched Haggar work and let her disgust overpower the fear closing in around her throat.

* * *

_Let me have the traitor._

Lance felt like something inside him had turned to ice, slowing the thunder of his heart, turning the warm blood on his leg to liquid fire. He stared at Vit, struggling to find words to voice his horror, and took a single step backwards, toward Keith. He'd begun to stir, though Lance didn't dare risk a look down. He might be badly hurt, barely clinging to consciousness. Or he might be faking, waiting for an opportunity to take back the advantage in this battle. Either way, it was better to keep Vit's attention on himself.

That wasn't difficult.

"Are you fucking with me?" Lance hissed. "Or do you seriously think I'm going to give him to you?"

Vit spun his spear around, driving the tip into the floor and leaning his weight on the shaft. "He's a traitor," Vit said. "And a coward. There's nothing to stop him abandoning you the same way he abandoned the Empire. You're better off ditching him first."

"Like hell I am." Lance gripped his gun, wanting nothing more than to shoot Vit in his smarmy little mouth. But there were soldiers all around, each one of them ready to gun Lance down the second they didn't have Vit there to wave them off.

One of Arel's drones drifted into view, just a faint red light glowing through the smoke, but it was enough to tighten Lance's jaw. He didn't know if Thace had finished his work yet; it had been, what? Maybe five minutes since Lance and Keith had started this whole operation. That was half of what Thace had asked for, and the broadcast would have been quicker and easier than hacking the main security system.

Which mean the entire city might be watching him at this very moment. Waiting to see what he was made of. If he would abandon them. If he would prove to be no better than the Empire he was trying to unseat.

A hand closed around Lance's ankle, and he strained not to let his relief show on his face. Keith was alive. His grip was strong, and he squeezed twice as though to reassure Lance he was okay. Vit's eyes darted down, and he smirked--clearly he took the gesture for the plea of a helpless man.

Yeah, well screw him.

"Lord Zarkon has spoken," Vit hissed, shifting back to a ready stance. He pulled his spearhead out of the ground, though he still held it out his side. "The traitor's life is forfeit. Hand him over, and this all ends."

Lance barely stopped himself from snorting. _This all ends,_ sure. Even if he followed through on his promise to let Lance leave--even _if_ \--Keith was still dead. Thace, too, if and when Vit tracked him down. Whatever resistance remained on the homeworld would be crushed, either by the knowledge that Voltron had abandoned them, or more slowly as Vit continued his merciless campaign.

Lance wondered if the people watching right now would see it that way. Did they know Vit for the heartless bastard he was, or would they only hear what Vit wanted them to hear? That he was trying to be reasonable, and the paladins were prolonging this fight.

It didn't matter either way. "You're not taking him."

Vit's lip pulled back, baring long, wicked fangs. "You would sacrifice everything for that cowardly, hypocritical, self-righteous--?"

"Keith," Lance said, smiling as Keith squeezed his ankle once more--firmly this time, a warning to be ready. Lance raised his pistol, pointing it at Vit's head. "His name is Keith, and if you want him, you can damn well kill me first."

Vit laughed, flipping his spear around. The tip flashed white-violet, stinging Lance's eyes. "That can be arranged."

Vit swung the spear as he charged, his armor absorbing Lance's shots, and Lance had just a moment to panic before Keith surged to his feet and threw himself at Vit. They collided, Keith gasping in pain as he carried Vit to the ground. Vit kicked Keith off him and scrambled up, but Keith had found his second wind. He stood, listing to one side, and activated his bayard.

With a whistle, Vit signaled the guards stationed around the room, and they opened fire--focusing heavily on Keith, at least until Lance started picking them off, one by one. He counted eighteen soldiers left around the room, and he took down four before the rest of them got wise, at which point Lance had to raise his shield. He chose his shots carefully as he backed toward Keith, trying to cover him as he danced with Vit. It was hard, with the two of them going after each other as they were.

They needed to get out of here. It hadn’t been ten minutes yet, Lance didn’t think, but Thace would just have to deal with that. If they stayed here much longer they were both going to wind up dead.

The dust from the ceiling collapse had finally started to settle, but the smoke was still thick in the air--thick enough that Lance's helmet had automatically sealed some time ago and still hadn’t released. The light coming from one side of the room suggested an exit, but Lance couldn't be sure if the way was clear, or if the rubble had blocked all but a narrow opening.

They were going to have to try something, though. There were too many soldiers for Lance to take them all out alone, unless he wanted to end up full of lasers, and Keith was in no shape to take on Vit alone for long.

Bracing his shield against an onslaught of lasers, Lance wracked his brain for a plan.

* * *

_The pain hit her first._

_It came out of nowhere, a hot brand driven through her core for the briefest of moments._

_The Blue Lion reached out, panic flooding her mind. Lealle. Where was Lealle?_

_Cold seeped in after the searing pain, numbing the edges of the wound. Blue poured her Quintessence into the bond, trying to shore it up, trying to lend her strength to Lealle. If she could find her--if she could get to her--_

_But it was too late._

* * *

Val hit water, icy cold, and her breath rushed out of her on a burst of bubbles. She tumbled, her lungs burning, and tried to put her scattered thoughts in order. Blue... She'd been in Blue's cockpit with Nyma. A vision of Lance had hit them both, knocking them senseless for a time, and they'd gone to their stations to try to make sense of what was happening. Then...

Lealle.

Val finally regained her bearings, steadying herself in the water and letting her buoyancy pull her toward the surface. Only once she was sure she was rising did she kick, the burn in her chest spreading as long seconds ticked by with no air in sight.

Could you drown on the astral plane, Val wondered?

She assumed that was where she was, anyway. It was that, or she'd somehow accidentally bilocated to the bottom of the pool. Considering the vision of Lealle that had rushed through her like a bolt of lightning, though, she thought the astral plane was the safer bet.

Val's head finally broke the surface, and she sucked in air, her head pounding in time with her pulse. She opened her eyes to a muddy twilight, wiping water from her face so she could search for the shoreline.

Instead, a wave crashed over her, driving her back below the surface, and Val thrashed as she swallowed water. She broke the surface, coughing, but forced herself to pull in one deep breath in case she was forced underwater again. She blinked her eyes clear, and her heart sank as she got her first good look at her surroundings--a storm-tossed sea, the water dark and choppy, with enough big waves to be concerning--but not completely unmanageable.

Val dove under the next wave, then scanned the horizon for land. She found some, blessedly close--a towering island that rose high above the waves. She spotted an awful lot of awfully steep cliffs, but she wasn't going to think about that yet. This wasn't Blue's Heart as Val had seen it before, but it was Blue who had brought her here. She wouldn't deliberately put Val in danger, right?

Well, Val supposed she'd find out. She swam, focusing on the motion of her body and the rhythm of the waves--and not on the oppressive clouds hovering overhead, or the lightning that flashed within.

It was only once her feet found the sandy bottom and she was able to drag herself to shore--a narrow strip of black-sand beach nestled in a cove surrounded by tall cliffs--that the fear finally caught up to her. She crawled just far enough to keep out of the waves, then collapsed, shivering as a chill wind cut through her sopping wet clothes--the same jeans and sweater she'd been wearing on the castle-ship. She'd been so unnerved by the discovery that Nyma had had the same dream as her that she hadn't wanted to waste the time to change into her armor.

She wished now that she hadn't been in such a rush. At least her armor could regulate temperature. Could have sealed out the waves, too, and made the trip to shore that much easier.

Well, she was here now, alone on an island surrounded by a stormy sea, with no clue why Blue had brought her here. Val reached out for her and found only the storm--dark clouds that promised rain but hadn't yet opened up.

A light swept through the darkness, warm and bright and calming. The light felt more like the Blue Lion Val knew than the storm, and she stood, backing away from the cliff as she traced the light back to its source. A lighthouse. There was a lighthouse up there on top of the cliff, its beacon blazing in defiance of the storm.

Deja vu hit Val hard, and she turned, scanning the shoreline, the cliffs. She'd... She'd been here before. She hadn't made it down to the beach, and it hadn't been storming when she was here, but this island--this was where she'd brought Matt and Allura and Edi when they were all scattered across the astral realm between Roya Vosar and Oriande. Except it wasn't a lighthouse that had stood on that cliff overlooking the sea; it had been a tower that contained a doorway to Oriande.

The light swept by again, and as it passed overhead, Val felt another tug, like Blue was calling her to that lighthouse. A glance around the beach showed no easy way up, but Val had found her own way around the astral realm last time she was here. She'd even mostly mastered it by the end.

With a deep breath, Val fixed her eyes on the distant lighthouse, reached for her Quintessence, and willed herself to move.

* * *

"How's it coming, Keith?" Lance whispered, slithering under the broken table to take aim at a new group of guards. He was well protected under here--whatever Zarkon made his meeting tables out of, it could withstand everything from a detonation that caved in the ceiling to an onslaught from two dozen rifles. Props to the manufacturer, seriously.

Unfortunately, the longer Lance stayed under here, the more apt Vit's soldiers were to turn their attention back to Keith, who was only protected in as much as the soldiers didn't want to hit Vit by mistake. Lance had been reluctant to leave him at all, but making Keith stay in one place to protect him from Vit was only hurting them both.

So, cover it was.

Keith's frustrated growl was loud enough that Lance could have heard it without the comms, and he grimaced. He'd expected as much. Keith was still hurting from the first blow Vit had dealt. Lance wasn't sure how bad the damage was, except that it had put Keith on the ground for well over a minute. He was back in the fight now, running purely on spite and adrenaline, so far as Lance could tell, but he was slowing.

The fact that he couldn't step back to catch his breath without turning himself into target practice only made things that much worse.

"Got it," Lance said, taking down two more soldiers before the rest turned their fire on him. He scuttled back deeper under the table, hissing as a few lucky shots slipped past the barricade to snap at his heels. His leg still burned where Vit had cut him, and all this twisting and turning was aggravating the laser burn in his side. "Then you'll be happy to hear that it's time to get out of here."

Keith roared, and Vit cursed. Past the upended chairs and chunks of ceiling tiles, Lance saw Vit stumble back, and Keith hissed, "You have a plan?" as the soldiers opened fire on him.

Lance grimaced, taking advantage of the distraction to drop three more of the soldiers blocking the way to the atrium. Most of them had closed ranks on this side of the room, and more stepped up to fill their places as they dropped. The rest of the force was still out there, then. Lance had figured as much, but it was a sobering confirmation. They weren't out of this yet.

"Things are going to get loud here in a second," Lance said, holstering his pistol--the one he still had; he'd lost track of the other one after he dropped it early in the fight. "Just be ready to run."

Keith grunted an acknowledgement before charging forward to meet Vit as he caught his balance. Lance summoned his bayard, but rather than his rifle, he opted for his grenade launcher. It was messy enough that he didn't use it often, but right now what he needed was messy. He adjusted the settings, settled the barrel into the crook of an upturned chair's legs, and took aim at the broad swath of light that pointed toward an exit. The smoke was still too thick to make out many details, but he was pretty sure this was where the reinforcements had entered the room.

He took aim, then turned his attention toward Keith and Vit, waiting until their duel turned them around. The brunt of the explosion shouldn't reach into the room, but just in case it did, Lance wanted Vit to take the brunt of it. More importantly--if the explosion came from behind Vit, he would have to turn to assess the threat, which would give Keith an opening.

They spun, Keith dropping low as Vit swung high, and Lance pulled the trigger.

The grenade--a gelatinous blob that glowed faintly blue--arced out past the line of soldiers and disappeared into the smoke, its light diffusing as it struck the rubble with a wet _thump_ and stuck. Lance traded his bayard for his shield, turning it sideways to fit underneath the conference table, and closed his eyes as he braced for the explosion.

He felt the blast in his chest, and more dust and bits of plaster rained down from the ceiling to patter against the tabletop.

Lance was moving before his ears had stopped ringing, accepting Keith's outstretched hand to haul himself upright. Bodies lay twisted in the rubble and smoke, faint blue embers still glowing on their armor, but Lance didn't stop to feel guilty for that. He summoned his bayard once more, upping the power, and, as Keith turned to fend off Vit's attack from behind, fired another grenade out into the atrium.

Someone shouted, and Lance fell back against Keith, shielding them both from the blast. The flash stung his eyes even through closed eyelids, but the way ahead was clear, the sunlight filtering through the smoke showing huddled figures to either side, but only fallen bodies straight ahead.

"Keith!" Lance called. "Let's go!"

Keith shouted wordlessly as he drove Vit back, then turned and sprinted with Lance for the exit. A few people called out to stop the paladins, a few lasers flashed past, most of them flying high or cutting through the air where they'd been several seconds before. Lance didn't slow--at least not until Vit came charging past, leaping off the reception desk and firing his jets to land him directly in Lance's path, spear crackling.

There was no time to change out his weapon, or to duck behind Keith to cover him while he held Vit's attention. Instead, Lance just dialed back the charge on his grenades and fired.

Without missing a beat, Vit spun, catching the grenade on his spearhead. It stuck, crackling now with contained lightning in addition to the warning pulse of blue, and Lance's heart stopped beating as Vit continued his spin. He turned the spear around, drew back, and threw it at Lance like a javelin--a javelin now carrying an explosive charge.

"Lance!" Keith roared.

He didn't wait for Lance to respond, just tackled him, carrying them both to the ground as Vit's spear passed by and buried its head in the front of the reception desk an instant before the charge detonated.

The roar was deafening, the light so bright Lance had to turn his eyes into the crook of his arm. Heat washed over him, the shockwave hitting him like a physical blow. He and Keith were pushed backward, tumbling over rubble. Keith was ripped away in the chaos, and Lance reached out blindly as he rolled to a stop, every inch of him radiating pain.

He pushed himself up on shaking arms, blinking to clear his vision, but the room kept wanting to tilt on an angle. Keith lay sprawled nearby, the back of his armor scorched black.

"Keith," Lance whispered, rooted to the spot.

Vit's laugh slid down his spine like ice, and he forced himself to stand. He had to get to Keith. Had to get him out of here.

Keith wasn't moving.

Lance summoned his bayard as he spotted Vit approaching from the thick black smoke. He hadn't escaped the explosion unscathed, either, at least. He was unarmed, his armor blacked and cracked, and violet blood matted his fur beneath his helmet.

Lance turned his rifle on Vit and fired twice. Both shots went wide--his warped vision and his shaking hands working against him. "Stay back," he said, backing up until he had nowhere else to go.

Vit's lip curled. "You're seriously going to die for him?"

"Together or not at all," Lance said. Vit kept walking forward, unfazed by Lance's shots. He was close enough now that Lance couldn't miss, even in his current state, but Vit's armor wasn't yet so badly damaged that it couldn't stop the lasers. He smacked away the barrel of Lance's gun, and Lance stumbled back, his heel finding Keith's arm.

Cursing, Lance squared his stance. He let his bayard revert to its inactive form, then activated it one more time, this time as the glaive. He swung, and however clumsy the strike was, the gleaming blue-edged blade was enough to ward off Vit. He was breathing hard now, the blood running into one eye so he had to keep it squeezed shut. He favored his right leg, just slightly.

Not that Lance was much better off. He tasted blood on his tongue, and his pounding headache was making it hard to think about what he had to do.

Protect Keith.

That was what he had to do.

Lance held his glaive ready and braced himself for a fight. He wasn't leaving without Keith, and Keith wasn't going anywhere until Lance cleared the way.

Together, or not at all.

* * *

Akira doubled over in the hallway, the dread that had been hanging over him suddenly crashing down. His head spun, his chest tightening as he forgot how to breathe. The hallway--the one where the paladins slept--felt suddenly, suffocatingly small. He’d all but run here from the safe room, ignoring Matt’s insistence that he was fine.

He’d been so sure that Matt needed him, but now he saw that he’d been wrong.

It wasn’t Matt he was supposed to get to.

This wasn’t where he was supposed to be.

"Akira?"

Allura's voice was pitched high with alarm. Her hand settled on his shoulder, but it was a strangely distant sensation, like his mind was pulling out of his body. Pulling toward... something. Danger. He shouldn't be here. He shouldn't be standing still.

"Akira, try to breathe with me. Akira? Can you hear me?"

He tried to answer her, but it was difficult to focus on where he _was_ instead of where he should have been.

"I need to go."

"You--what?" Allura caught his wrist as he turned to go. "Akira, what's happening? Where do you need to go?"

Where _did_ he need to go? He wasn't sure, but he felt as though he knew. Like if he just turned and walked, he'd figure it out along the way. All he needed to know right now was that he wasn't meant to be on the Castle of Lions.

He pulled his hand out of Allura's grip and started walking again, phantom pains lancing down his spine, across his ribs, into his heart. His head pounded. His throat burned.

He needed to _move_.

"Shiro!"

Thundering footsteps. A fist pounding on a door.

"Shiro!"

The hushed voices faded behind him as he continued on, headed for the elevator.

Another hand closed around his arm, and he turned, ready to tell Allura to let him go. Ready to tell his brother that this was something he had to do.

Instead, he found Matt standing there, pale and shaking, and as soon as they locked eyes Akira knew Matt had felt it, too.

Something was wrong.

Something had changed.

"It's Keith," Takashi said, coming up behind Matt with Allura. "Isn't it?"

Akira nodded, his mouth still too dry to speak.

Matt squeezed his arm. "I can feel Red. She's halfway across the universe, but I can _feel_ her freaking out."

"I need to go," Akira said again. He held Matt's gaze for a long moment, then looked up at Takashi and Allura. "I don't know what's happening, but I know that Keith needs me."

Takashi opened his mouth, and Akira knew him well enough to knew when he was at a loss for what to do. He wanted to come--they all did, and Akira knew it, but he recoiled from the thought. Going in force was a bad idea. Going together, taking any of the lions--it squeezed tight around his throat the same way standing still did.

He couldn't have explained it to the others, could hardly even explain it to himself, but he knew.

He _knew._

Running footsteps broke the uneasy silence filling the corridor, and Akira whipped around, every nerve ready for a fight. It was only Coran, though, Karen following a few paces behind. She looked concerned, but Coran--

Coran looked just about as bad as Akira felt.

Matt cursed, softly, and Karen opened her mouth to admonish him before giving up the effort. Her eyes found Akira, and she frowned.

"What's going on?" she demanded. "We were working on Coalition business when Coran suddenly bolted from the room."

Akira turned to Coran, the drumbeat in his chest growing more frantic at the tightness around Coran's eyes. "Lance?"

"He's holding it together," Coran said by way of confirmation. "Focused. Probably in the middle of a mission. I have a feeling he'd be panicking otherwise." He paused. "It's Keith, isn't it? He's hurt."

Akira shook his head, not so much a denial as utter helplessness. "I need to be there," he said, his feet carrying him past the others.

Karen caught him by the arm as he passed. "Hold on a minute. We can't just go charging in there with no information. You say something happened to Keith and Lance? Can we contact them?" She turned toward Takashi. "Have we tried?"

Takashi's pinched expression said it all. "It's only been a few minutes," he said, apologetic. "There could be any number of reasons they haven't responded yet."

"Well, try again," Karen said. "We need to know what we're getting into before we go and make things worse."

She tried to tow Akira back toward the open door of Shiro's room, but Akira ripped his arm from her grasp. "No," he said. The panic had hardened to something cool and unyielding inside him, and his words came out in kind. "Knowledge is your domain, Karen, not mine. I need to go. _Now._ "

Matt crossed the hallway to grab his mother's arm before she could reach it out toward Akira a second time. "I think we should listen to him, Mom." He met Akira's eyes, then turned toward Allura. "Can you open a wormhole for him?"

Allura hesitated, confusion and concern plain on her face. "I... Is he the only one going? Shouldn't we all-"

"Not yet." Akira balled his hand into a fist at his side. _Too long._ This was taking too long. "We'll need you later, but--please--I need to _go_. And I need to go alone."

Allura and Takashi shared looks, and Akira saw the moment they relented. He was already backing away by the time Allura nodded. "Go. We'll follow when we can."

* * *

Val stumbled a little as she placed herself on the uneven ground outside the lighthouse. She'd forgotten the peculiar vertigo of bilocating in the astral realm--not bilocating so much as straight-up teleportation. She stumbled, catching herself on the wall of the lighthouse, an obelisk of white stone with a platform up by the light and a door on the front and nothing at all to indicate that there might be keepers living here.

As soon as her hand touched the wall--smooth and cool and slick, like it was made of ice rather than stone--she felt the tug of the Blue Lion again. Her mind was distant, like a beacon staring out over a stormy sea, and Val sensed fear and pain lurking on the horizon.

_Lealle's body, cold and still as Alfor carried her through the castle to the memorial hall. In the next instant, it wasn't Lealle who lay limp, but Lance, smoke and rubble all around, crimson and violet blood staining his armor._

"Val!"

Val turned, her heart leaping at the sight of Nyma climbing the hill toward her. She had her arms wrapped around herself against the chill wind, but her clothes were dry, and without hair to look windswept, she looked entirely too put-together to fit with the scene around them.

Val ran to her anyway, remembering her wet clothes too late to spare Nyma a cold, damp hug. At least the body heat was nice.

Nyma wrinkled her nose. "Did you go for a swim?" she asked, casting a dark look at the ocean.

"Not voluntarily," Val said. "Did you get those visions of Lealle, too?"

Nyma smiled thinly. "Not exactly a reassuring follow-up to the ones about Lance."

Fear tightened Val's grip on Nyma, enough to make Nyma wince. "Sorry," Val muttered, trying to shake off the images that had entered her mind when she touched the tower. "I just want to find out what's going on."

"And where the hell we are."

"That part's easy," Val said, pulling Nyma toward the lighthouse. "Astral plane."

"What, like the Heart? This isn't… _Is_ this what the Heart looks like?"

Val tipped her head to the side. "No. I mean, it’s not where I usually show up when I come to the Heart. But I took a tour of the astral realm when we were looking for Oriande. This is definitely part of it, and I'm pretty sure it's connected to the Hearts somehow, even if it's not technically part of them? I dunno, but that lighthouse is definitely connected to Blue."

Holding off on whatever protests she still had, Nyma followed Val to the lighthouse. They laid their hands on the stones, Val's over Nyma's, and the images swarmed them at once. Images of Lealle, of Lance. A flash of Meri, a Galra shift falling away as shadows loomed over her and someone laughed.

 _Blue,_ Val thought pointedly. She sharpened the thought, cast it into the storm like the lighthouse beacon. Blue was out there somewhere, caught up in a literal and emotional storm. That storm tried to toss Val and Nyma around, but they held onto each other, anchoring themselves against the wind and waves until they caught themselves on Blue's consciousness.

They soothed her, pulling her mind away from Lealle and Lance and Meri and back to them.

 _We're here,_ Val said. _We're right here. We can get through this together._

 _Just tell us what's happening,_ Nyma added.

Blue's mind tried to pull them back to Lealle, and though it cut Val to the core, she resisted. It hurt, but that was in the past. Val willed Blue to understand. Whatever might have happened to Lance or to Meri--what had happened, or what was going to happen--it wasn't like ten thousand years ago.

 _We can help._ God, Val hoped they could help. She reached for the distant presence that was Lance, trying to use the bond to reach out to him. The fact that she could sense him was reassuring in its own right. He was alive. Maybe hurt, maybe just in danger; she couldn't tell if these visions were of the future, or if she was actually seeing Lance in real time.

Even if he was hurt, though, they might not be too late.

Val stretched farther, ignoring Nyma's confusion. Blue sensed her intent and stirred, something shifting within the bond. The visions returned in force--closer and more vivid than they'd been before, rushing toward her and sweeping her up. The island fell away. The island, the storm, and Val herself, until all that was left was a smoky, rubble-strewn room with the faintest suggestion of Nyma beside her.

Lance stood before them, bloody and bruised. He held a bladed weapon Val hadn't seen before, like a sword affixed to a spear shaft, and faced down a lithe Galra in scorched armor. Keith lay on the ground behind Lance, unmoving.

 _ **Help,**_ Blue said. _**Help them.**_

* * *

Even with Vit disarmed and injured, Lance was at a disadvantage. He couldn't leave Keith to chase Vit down, but switching back to his rifle was slow enough for Vit to close the distance and attack. And Lance couldn't retreat when he did so, or he risked Vit getting his hands on Keith.

So he stood, and he fought. He cast about him for something, anything, he could use to his advantage.

All he found were more enemies.

Most of Vit's troops had gone down in the explosions, or had retreated somewhere safe. The few who remained seemed groggy and uncoordinated--but they were starting to move, a few of them grabbing guns, a few dragging injured comrades out of the line of fire. If they hadn't attacked yet, it was only because they couldn't be sure of their aim.

Even if Lance took Vit down, he was only opening him up to other attacks.

He reached up to the comms controls on his helmets, switching to Thace's frequency and calling for him. Thace would have his comms off, of course. Too much risk of discovery if the Imperials had the right security in place.

But maybe he was out by now.

Maybe he would hear.

Until then, Lance would continue to hold.

It was all he could do.

* * *

Akira flew, a wormhole blossoming before him, the swirl of blue light a storm to match the panic simmering in his gut.

_Keith._

There were no specifics to his fear. He wasn't Karen; he couldn't know what was happening to his paladins. He thought he would have felt it if Keith had died. He thought, at least, it would have felt different than this.

As soon as he emerged from the wormhole, he understood why it had been so important that he come alone. There was a fleet here--not the largest they'd faced, not by a considerable margin. There was only one warship to be found, hovering on the far side of the planet near the exposed core crystal. But smaller ships--fighters and gunners and patrol drones and even unmanned satellites--thickened the air everywhere else. There were so many of them, and in such close proximity, that a lion never would have made it through without hitting dozens of ships and alerting the whole fleet to their whereabouts.

Hell, Akira's usual fighter might not have made it through. He'd opted for one of the stealth fighters--sleek black and compact, too small for Akira to have brought anyone along even if he'd wanted to. It had been a snap judgment on Akira's part, because stealth had seemed more important than firepower, given the situation.

He wondered if that had been Red, too.

The flame of his panic flared brighter when his eyes lit on the homeworld. Keith was there, close, _hurt_. Akira could nearly hear Red roaring at him to hurry.

Akira wasted no time in complying. He spared a cursory glance for the stealth systems, and when no alerts caught his eye, he pushed forward into the minefield of enemy ships. He took it fast, faster than he would have during an ordinary stealth mission. He was a cargo pilot; slow and steady. Takashi had always been the type for go faster, higher, farther, while Akira played it safe and got his load through in one piece.

Well, he was channeling his brother now. Channeling Keith, too, for that matter. He'd seen the kid try maneuvers like this, usually in Red with Matt when their maneuverability was at its best. Ships flashed by on all sides, close enough that Akira could have reached outside the cockpit and touched them. All it would take was clipping a single satellite, and his advantage would be lost.

But Red kept urging him faster, so Akira let go of years of training and _flew_.

He was inside the atmosphere before anyone knew he was there. The irony was that the Imperial fleet's overwhelming numbers were probably what saved them, if not in the way they'd intended. The tech on this ship would shield it from any scanners; the sleek, black chassis made it almost invisible against a backdrop of stars.

But true cloaking was almost unheard of, even for Alteans. They came very, very close, but it wasn't perfect. And there were so many eyes trained on the homeworld that sooner or later someone was bound to notice something out of the ordinary.

It was just Akira's luck that it turned out to be _sooner_.

The first shot flashed passed to starboard. Akira was already taking evasive action by the time it registered as more than a variation in the light. There was no time to think, no time to do anything other than curse about the fact that he had no idea which of the hundreds of dome cities below was the right one. The 301, that was what Keith had called it. For all the good it did; it wasn't like the domes had their numbers painted on top of them in numerals big enough to see from space.

He dodged, twisting and rolling and racing ever closer to the sun-bleached landscape below, but each laser that missed its mark sank hooks into his mind. This wasn't luck; it couldn't be. And Akira knew he didn't have that kind of skill. Which meant Red.

The moment he made the connection, he automatically tried to identify her touch. He knew it was a mistake as soon as he started, but a second was all it took. He second-guessed himself, hesitated for only a fraction of a second, and a laser clipped his wing.

He fought with the yoke, trying to regain a semblance of control, but he was flying too fast, and too close to the ground. He entered a spin, pale brown and terra cotta red alternating with a dusty blue sky.

Akira ejected at the last moment--later than he should have, really, which made for a rough landing. But at least he hadn't made a massive target of himself for too long in the interim.

The Imperials were still coming, though, lasers ripping chunks out of the ground all around. The smoking wreckage of his ship was torn to shreds as he undid his flight restraints and scrambled away from anything that might draw the enemy's eye--and laserfire. It was no use, though. He'd landed in the middle of a featureless plain, not a cliff or cave in sight to shield him from the sky. He ran, searching for something, _anything_.

It wasn't geography that saved him, in the end. It was Red herself, arriving with a roar that shook the ground beneath his feet. She dove from the sky, mouth open wide, and Akira didn't have a chance to be scared before she was upon him, slowing just enough for him to leap aboard before she snapped her mouth shut and took off for the horizon.

* * *

Nyma had just about had it with all these vrekking visions.

First the dreams of Lance, repeated with a vengeance in the Blue Lion's hangar. Then a flash of Lealle's death. Now... this?

She stood in the center of a large room that was filled with smoke and dust. Imperial soldiers, both dead and alive, ringed the room, but only one had come forward to engage with Lance. They were both in bad shape, the Galra weaponless, Lance breathing hard.

Keith lay on the ground behind him, terrifyingly still.

It seemed unreal: The smoke in the air, the furrow of Keith's brow. The way, when she'd first arrived and seen him lying there--just for an instant--she was looking at Rolo again, crumpled and helpless on the floor of an Imperial prison ship as Nyma ran away.

She wanted so badly to run away now.

It wasn't real.

It hadn't happened yet.

But it felt more real than the island in the middle of the stormy sea, for all she didn't seem to have a body in this space.

She tried to speak, and no sound came out.

She tried to move, and the space melted away, shifting so that she seemed to now be kneeling at Keith's side.

She reached out, and though she had no hands, she swore she felt the flutter of his pulse beneath her fingers.

* * *

Vit was taunting him.

He could have found a weapon on any of the fallen soldiers littering the room, surely. He could have ended this.

Instead, he went for Lance's bayard, time after time. He darted in close, braving Lance's blade, and tried to wrest it away from him. Lance fought with everything he had, ignoring the ache in his side and the way his leg kept trying to give out. He wasn't sure if someone who wasn't a paladin could wield a bayard, or if it would return to Lance's hand when he summoned it, but he didn't want to find out.

Vit was a hair taller than Lance, not much more solidly built, but he was strong, and he'd clearly trained in close combat like this, where Lance hadn't.

But Lance had Keith on the ground behind him, and that was more than enough reason to keep fighting.

Vit retreated momentarily, and Lance risked a few shots with his rifle--a poor choice, as it turned out. He was slow on the guard when Vit next rushed him, and Vit spun into a kick, driving his foot squarely into the gash on Lance's thigh. He cried out, pain radiating up into his hip, and nearly buckled.

He caught himself, but Vit hadn't wasted the opportunity. He reached for Lance's bayard, and Lance tightened his grip on it before letting himself fall, hoping that would rip it out of Vit's grasp.

Instead, Vit landed on top of him, straddling him and still fighting him for the bayard.

A laser blast caught Vit in the back of the shoulder and he hissed in fury, turning to look for the source of the attack. In that instant, Lance dismissed his bayard, reaching instead for the pistol still holstered at his hip. He brought it up and fired it at point blank.

The blast shattered Vit's helmet and he howled, clutching at his eye. He rolled aside before he could get hit again from either side, and Lance finally spotted Thace at the mouth of a side corridor, a cold expression on his face. He advanced as Vit retreated, and Lance scrambled up, summoning his rifle.

Thace glanced once at Keith as he arrived, his expression giving nothing away. Then he was focused on the enemy again, frowning as Vit ordered his men to close ranks at the door. There were only about a dozen of them left--few enough that Lance would have tried a charge if Keith had been in any shape to fight. As they were now, though, they'd be torn apart. Lance kept his rifle at the ready, but he didn't fire. Not yet. They were too exposed.

"How is he?" Thace asked.

Lance wet his lips, trying not to think too hard about the blast that had taken Keith out. He reached down without looking and pressed his fingers to Keith's neck. His pulse beat strong and steady, and Lance's breath left him in a rush. "Still with us," he told Thace. "But he needs help. Which means we need to get him out of here."

Thace closed his eyes for a moment, then drew his sword. "I'll clear a way for you."

Lance's heart clenched. "What--alone? There's like a dozen guys over there! You'll--"

"I know the risk I'm taking," Thace said. His voice was quiet and calm, and his gaze didn't waver as he straightened and turned to face the last of Vit's men. "Just promise me you'll get him out of here."

Lance hesitated, but what choice did they have? They either stayed here until Vit called in reinforcements and they all died, or they charged, and maybe some of them made it out.

"Goddamnit," Lance muttered, releasing his bayard and turning to Keith. "Does self-sacrifice run in the family or something?"

Thace breathed out a laugh as Lance gathered Keith in his arms and stood, swaying slightly as the added weight aggravated his wounds. He held on, though, gritting his teeth and forcing himself to move as Thace activated his blade and readied himself for the attack.

* * *

Akira had already taken a seat behind the controls of the Red Lion before the strangeness of the situation hit him. He froze there, hands hovering in midair, as Red skimmed across the ground, dodging laserfire from above. She seemed unconcerned with the orbital forces, except inasmuch as damage might slow her down.

Keith was ahead. That was all that mattered.

What Akira didn't get was why she'd gone to all the trouble of bringing him. She could clearly fly herself, and she probably wouldn't have drawn so much attention without Akira crashing the gates. Maybe the endless barrage was part of the plan?

Something like amusement skimmed across the surface of his mind--not so much a voice as an awareness. Akira had sensed Red before, but always in an abstract way. Her instincts, her directions. She'd never responded to something he'd thought before, at least not directly.

She purred, the vibrations taking root in Akira's bones. Here, too, was something just shy of words: a warning to focus. Something was about to happened.

The laserfire tapered off even as Akira caught sight of the dome in front of them, approaching fast. All at once, Red cut back on the thrusters, and Akira's seat--Keith's seat, really--shot forward.

"What the f--?" Akira jerked to a stop against his flight harness, the force of it driving the breath from his lungs. The controls stared up at him, inviting, and Red slowed still further. When Akira looked up through the viewscreen, he saw the streets of the 301 opening before him like canyons. They weren't narrow as roads went, but relative to Red's bulk--

Oh.

Akira grabbed the controls just before they reached the first building. Red turned into the opening, but she was built for fluid motion, not sharp angles and straight lines. Akira tried to correct, but he was slow on the uptake, and she was still making good time, even at a fraction of her full speed. They slammed against a big, blocky building--a warehouse, or maybe a factory. Metal shrieked, and Akira winced as Red roared in displeasure.

"Sorry," he muttered. "You could have given me a little warning, though. To be fair." The last word was more grunt than anything as he dragged them to the right and away from another building. It was bizarre, and it was already giving him a headache. They were both flying, him and Red, like two pilots controlling the same ship. He could sense some of her intent, and she probably saw a little of his in return, but Red didn't speak any language Akira knew. However much he tried to work with her, they kept pulling in different directions, leaving a string of destruction in their wake.

But Keith was close now. Close enough that Red seemed ready to plow through buildings rather than continue navigating around them. Akira fought her at every turn, willing her to calm down. It would do no good to get to Keith if it meant bringing the ceiling down on top of him.

"We're almost there," Akira said aloud. "We're going to make it. Just hold on a little longer."

* * *

Thace threw himself into battle, taking on Vit and six of his soldiers at once. He flowed from sword to pistol faster than Lance could track, not slowing even when blades and lasers found their mark. Lance itched to help him, but Keith was a heavy weight in his arms, breathing in quick, pained puffs as Lance waited and watched for an opening.

Spotting a break in the uneven perimeter, he dashed forward. But Keith slowed him, putting more weight on Lance's injured leg than he'd been expecting. He stumbled, and two soldiers moved to intercept him, forcing him back behind the remains of a map pedestal, which he placed between himself and the soldiers as a barricade. He wanted a weapon in hand, but didn't dare set Keith down, even for a second.

Vit’s triumphant cry drew Lance’s attention back to the far side of the atrium just in time to watch Thace fall, his own sword, in Vit’s hand, dripping violet blood.

Lance’s breath caught in his throat, but the two soldiers pinning him in had also turned toward Vit’s cry. There was a clear line to the front doors, and however much it pained Lance to leave Thace behind, however much he hated himself for even considering it…

Keith needed him. Lance couldn’t carry them both, and when it came right down to it, the choice between Keith and Thace wasn’t a choice at all.

Still he hesitated, backing toward the front doors one step at a time, his eyes never leaving Thace. He was down, one leg glistening with blood, but he still had his gun, and he wasn’t letting anyone get close to him. There was still a chance… He wasn’t dead yet…

The front wall of the Kral Mestna shattered behind Lance. He froze, spine tingling as chunks of stone and metal rained down around him. A few bounced off his armor, but nothing as large as the slab that fell atop the nearby soldiers, crushing them beneath its bulk.

Across the atrium, Vit dropped Thace’s sword, his lips parting as the first hint of fear dawned on his face. A deafening roar rattled what remained of the crystals embedded in the ceiling and resounded in Lance’s chest like the bassline of a favorite song.

Relief so potent it sapped the strength from Lance's legs washed through him, and he turned, sprinting toward the Red Lion as she ducked her head through the opening she’d made. Lance charged up the ramp that extended for him, a single thought running on loop in his mind. Red would keep Keith safe. Red would protect him at any cost.

He stopped, briefly, at the sight of Akira in the pilot's seat, where he'd intended to set Keith.

"How...?"

Akira flashed a smile. "Long story. Hold on. I'm not exactly trained on these controls."

"Wait!" Lance called as Akira started to pull Red out of the Kral Mestna. "Thace is still in there."

Akira turned, his eyes sticking on Keith's limp form, and then flickering a few feet to the side.

"I know he's hurt," Lance said, "but I don't think he's dying. Give me thirty seconds. Please."

Slowly, Akira nodded, and Lance eased Keith down onto a bench at the side of the cockpit before turning and rushing back toward the ramp, his rifle materializing in his hand as he went.

* * *

Val stared at Akira, who stared straight back at her.

Nyma knelt beside her--not quite tangible, but more so inside the Red Lion than she had been outside. Out there, Val had only distantly been aware of her presence at all. Now they could see each other, hear each other, even touch each other.

But they still weren't visible to Lance, or to any of the Galra in the ruins of the building where Lance had been fighting. Which was what made it so profoundly unsettling to have Akira staring at her as though he could see her clear as day. He hadn't said anything, even as Lance turned to charge back into battle. Val ached to go after him, but she couldn't do anything for him.

She _could_ help Keith.

It was Nyma who had figured it out, before they'd even come into the Red Lion. She could sense him, she said. She could sense his Quintessence, despite not being trained in that sort of thing the way Val was. Nyma had been trying to lend him some of her strength, grasping at vague instincts to keep him stable as the battle raged on. Once they'd reached the lion and she'd been able to explain to Val what she was doing, Val had joined in with a hand on Nyma's back, adding her Quintessence to Nyma's.

She did so now with half a mind, the rest of her focused on Akira. "So... Can you see us?"

Akira didn't answer, which Val supposed was, itself, answer enough. He blinked a few times, frowning slightly, and finally tore his gaze away from Val when Lance came stumbling back up the ramp, Thace's arm over his shoulders. Val's heart clenched at the sight of him, bloodied and grimacing. She'd never known Thace to be particularly expressive, which meant he must have been in a lot of pain for it to show now on his face.

"Now!" Lance said, breathless. "Get us out of here!"

"Don't need to tell me twice," Akira said. He turned Red around and took off for the edge of the city, the flight slow and clumsy, the cockpit jostling as he ricocheted off buildings. It was strange, seeing him in the pilot's seat, and it made Val wonder how much of this was actually real. She'd been convinced it was all some sort of weird vision right up until seeing Nyma inside Red; somehow, that seemed to be just a little bit too much for her to pass off as hallucination.

But then... what did that mean? Were they actually here? Had she...?

Below her, Nyma huffed, and Val forced her attention back to the matter at hand.

Keith.

"Is he okay?" Val asked.

"I don't know," Nyma said, sounding frazzled. "I don't even know what I'm doing. You're the one with the magic."

That was true, but that didn't mean Val had the first clue how to do what Nyma seemed to have stumbled onto by mistake. She'd tried, when they first tumbled into the Red Lion after Lance and Nyma had blurted it all out. But Val had never trained in Quintessence healing, like Allura and Shay had. She didn't know much at all about affecting other people's Quintessence. She doubted she would have been much use under normal circumstances, and being a disembodied spirit who may or may not actually have access to her own Quintessence reserves didn't make it any easier.

So she'd left the technical bits to Nyma and just offered her own energy--Nyma seemed to have no trouble drawing the Quintessence out of Val, however much she insisted she wasn't doing anything.

Maybe this was all Blue's doing, though hell if Val knew how that worked.

"He's... He's holding on," Nyma said after a moment. She seemed to be straining for calm, but they were linked here the same way they were linked when piloting Blue. Val knew how scared Nyma really was. "It looks bad, but maybe that's just--I don't know-- Maybe it doesn't run as deep as you would think."

"Maybe," Val agreed. She glanced to Thace, who had slumped down against the wall, but waved off Lance's hovering concern. Lance's face pulled tight with guilt, but he didn't linger once Thace waved; he just turned and hurried over to Keith, passing straight through Val and Nyma to reach his side.

Nyma let out a disgusted noise and shifted to be well out of Lance's space, Val moving with her. Where Nyma's attention was all on Keith, however, Val stared at her cousin. He looked tired. More than tired, really. He looked like he wanted to collapse.

"He needs a cryopod," Lance called up to Akira. "Can you get us back to the castle?"

Akira hesitated, and the Red Lion rumbled around them. "I can try, but there's a fleet in orbit that's not going to let us go without a fight, and I'll be honest. I don't think I'm good enough to get through in one piece. Red may be letting me fly her, but I'm not a paladin. Hell, you'd probably be better at this than me."

"I don't have a bond with Red at all," Lance argued. "You do, even if it's not a paladin bond."

The answering silence oozed skepticism. As though to punctuate Akira's point, they slammed against another building, and Lance dropped down onto the bench beside Keith, steadying him with a hand on his shoulder.

"Like I said," Akira muttered. "I can try. I just get the feeling that Red's not running at a hundred percent with me at the controls."

"It may be better to go to ground," Thace said. "You have emergency medical supplies here, do you not? We can stabilize Keith, get in touch with the other paladins..." He paused in the middle of trying to stand, and lowered himself back to the ground as he exhaled a long, slow breath. "They can cover us while we bypass the fleet. It's less risky that way."

"Unless Keith crashes while we're waiting," Lance said.

Val felt a tingle on the side of her head and turned to find Akira watching her again, his brow furrowed. "I don't think he's in any immediate danger," he said. He tore his eyes away from Val and patted the console beside him. "Red's not as panicked as she was before, anyway, and I think if things were that bad, she'd already have us up in orbit.”

It was true, now that Val thought about it. The tension that had been crackling in the air ever since she’d arrived had finally broken. Lance, who looked near to collapse, suddenly folded at the waist, dropping his head between his knees. He laced his hands behind his head and breathed once, twice.

“Okay,” he whispered, a prayer as much as an agreement. It loosened the panic in Val’s chest, which loosened the panic on Nyma’s face.

Somewhere, more distantly, a storm broke, and sunshine hit Val’s face, dazzling her. Red's cockpit became a stormy sea for a moment, the two images fighting for her attention until the sunlight shifted, warming Val even as it reminded her of her wet clothes and the lingering chill of the sea.

The rumble of Red's engines persisted for a moment after the vision had faded, and Lance's sigh sounded as close as though he stood at her shoulder.

"Okay. Find us somewhere to hole up. I'll go get the med kit."

The crashing of the waves made itself known, washing away the last, lingering traces of the homeworld. Then it was just Val and Nyma, alone on an island with their hands pressed to an ordinary block of white stone.


	38. Bated Breath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... A mission gone wrong on the Galra homeworld led to Keith badly injured and Lance fighting desperately to protect him. Akira, spurred on by the instincts granted him by the Red Lion, slipped through the fleet in orbit to reach the homeworld. He crash landed, but Red was there to pick him up, and the two of them got Keith and Lance, along with Thace, to safety. Meanwhile Val and Nyma astrally projected to the homeworld (somewhat by accident), where Nyma shared her Quintessence with Keith to help stabilize him.
> 
> Elsewhere in the universe, Hunk and Shay continue their search for free Balmera, Meri struggles to maintain her cover as a student of Haggar, and the rest of the paladins are anxiously waiting for word from Akira and prepping for a rescue mission, should it prove necessary.

Shiro sat in the darkened comms bay with Allura at his shoulder, Matt pacing behind them. Not for the first time, he wanted to take Allura down to Black and see for himself what was happening. Except that they didn’t have that kind of range, and he wanted to be here when Akira got in touch. They should have just gone from the start, before an emergency call from Akira was even on the table.

"We have to give him time," Shiro said, his voice ringing hollow to his own ears. "It's going to take time for him to get there and find them, and he's not going to stop to contact us until the situation is under control."

"Red isn't panicking anymore," Matt added. It sounded like it should have been a reassurance, but worry still strangled his voice, and he'd ignored Shiro's every effort to calm him down. "At least, she's not panicking so bad I can feel it. That's probably a good sign, right?"

Shiro wished he had an answer to that. He looked up at Allura, then tried again to ping Akira's comms. The signal wouldn't go through, just as it hadn't gone through the last five times Shiro had tried. It had been twenty minutes now since Akira disappeared through the wormhole--an eternity, and yet no time at all. Keith could have died in that time. Akira could have died. Or they might all be on their way back right now.

He doubted it, but it was a possibility.

Allura rubbed his back, though she couldn't hide her own concern. She could probably see Shiro starting to spiral--berating himself for not stopping Akira, and then reminding himself that he'd promised Akira he wouldn't do that anymore. This was war. They all took risks. Akira had the right to make his own decisions, and he had the skill to pull himself--and Keith--through. Shiro just had to trust him.

"We'll give him another half-hour," Allura said firmly. "If we haven't heard from him by then, we'll send someone through to get a handle on the situation."

"In half an hour, we might be too late." Matt turned, his fist thumping against the wall. "What if Keith is hurt? What if Akira crashed?"

"Then we'd be too late anyway," Shiro said, more harshly than he intended. He took a deep breath, then dropped his head into his hands. "I know you're worried, Matt. So am I. But Allura is right. Akira said he had to go alone. Sending someone through, even a single scout, is a risk. A full-blown rescue mission?” He shook his head. “We should give Akira a chance to find them and get to safety before we assume the worst."

Silence answered him, and he didn't want to look Matt's way to find out what he was thinking. Shiro's words had probably just made things worse, but his usual knack for comfort was nowhere to be found today. Not with both his brothers missing, one certainly in a bad position, the other going in blind.

The helplessness, Shiro found, was the worst part of all this.

The door hissed open, and the light from the hallway spilled through, stinging Shiro's eyes. He turned, and the urgency in Val's posture propelled him to his feet before he'd even spotted Nyma standing behind her.

Val's gaze swept the room, then found Shiro's.

"Coran said Akira's gone."

A simple statement, but Val put an immense weight behind it, and Shiro found himself holding his breath as he nodded. "He left twenty minutes ago. Something came up--"

"On the homeworld?" Val screwed her eyes shut. "Fuck. So much for that all being a dream."

"A dream?" Matt asked.

Allura stepped toward Val, one hand gripping the back of an empty chair. "What are you talking about? Has something happened?"

"We had a dream last night," Nyma said in a hollow voice. "The same dream. About Lance. Or Meri? I'm still not really sure, to be honest."

Val scrubbed at her face and squared her shoulders. "We went to see Blue and, long story short? I'm pretty sure we ended up astrally projecting to the homeworld."

Shiro blinked. "You... what?"

"Yeah, I'm still figuring that one out, too." Val pressed her hands together, her fingertips hovering just under her nose. "I'd been hoping it was all a dream--last night and just now--but so far everything's lining up, so I think we have to assume it was real."

"Keith is hurt," Nyma said, apparently deciding that Val wasn't getting to the point quick enough. Matt stopped breathing. "He's hurt bad. Lance and Thace were holding off a bunch of Imperials when we got there. They're both in rough shape, too, but not enough to make me worry."

"Nyma did something--I'm not sure what, but it seemed to be helping Keith. That's when Akira showed up, in Red."

"What?" Matt asked. He was breathless, and Shiro reached out for him at once, noting the tremor in his hand.

Val ignored the question. "We couldn't hold on long after that, but I did hear Akira say something about a fleet in orbit? He didn’t think he was going to be able to break through. It sounded like they were planning to find somewhere to hide and use the lion's emergency supplies to try to stabilize Keith until they could get in touch with us."

"How long ago was this?" Shiro asked.

"Assuming it was real time..." Val shrugged. "Five minutes? Maybe a little more. I'm not sure how long we were in the astral realm between leaving the homeworld and making it back here."

Allura glanced at Shiro. "That might not be enough time to secure their location."

"But they are going to need an extraction," Shiro said. He turned back to the comms station, but instead of Akira's frequency, he entered Lieutenant Commander Layeni's. "I'm going to have the Guard get us some information on this fleet. Then--Black?"

Allura didn't need him to say more, thankfully. She squeezed his shoulder, then left him to catch Layeni up on what was happening.

 _Just hold on,_ he thought. _We're coming for you._

* * *

"Still no answer," Lance said from somewhere near the front of the cockpit. Akira turned his head halfway toward him, but he couldn't make himself look away from Keith, who lay on his stomach on the cot against the wall, his armor stripped off and tossed aside, his black undersuit scorched and shredded.

"The Empire's jamming the signal," Akira said, too tired to question where the notion came from. Red, probably. The number of frantic impulses and random thoughts that had hit him in the last hour could have been because of his own panic and paranoia, but he had a feeling most of them were coming by way of Red.

Especially the recurring urge to get in there and help Thace with the first aid--a fine enough urge, except that he kept looking around for crystals and multitools and Q-conduit. That was all well and good for fixing a damaged lion, but it wouldn't do anything for Keith.

The cockpit was silent for a few moments as Thace methodically cleaned Keith's wounds--burns, mostly, but there were a few deep cuts where his armor hadn't protected him. Lance already had a bandage around his thigh and a Quintessence pack stuck to his side to mitigate the damage done by a laser that had clipped him during the fight.

"How's he looking?" Lance asked.

"Stable," Thace said, securing a fine mesh over a large portion of Keith's back. "But he needs a cryopod. What we have here is enough to stave off infection for a while, and I can try to manage his pain, but my options are limited. Without a proper medical facility, he's looking at a long, painful recovery."

Akira's eyes drifted back to Keith's face. He'd started to wake up while Akira took them back out into the wastelands in search of somewhere safe to hide, and Akira had heard the pain in his breathing even as Thace quietly doled out instructions to Lance--as much to keep him from panicking as anything, Akira suspected. They'd administered some kind of pain killer from Red's emergency kit. Akira wasn't sure anything out here could be compared to Earth terms, but even without knowing what was in the pain killers, it was obviously strong. Keith had quieted since then, his breathing evening out. He seemed to be awake at times, speaking in a low, slurred voice even Thace could hardly make out. Akira doubted he'd remember any of this later, which was probably for the best.

He itched to ask Thace how bad the burns were, but he doubted Galra used the same classification as Earth, and Akira's medical knowledge was sketchy enough that he didn't trust himself to accurately transpose between scales. Keith's armor seemed to have spared him the worst of it, though. His fur was burned off in places, his skin blistered and bleeding, but it was hard to tell how much of the char he saw was fur or fabric, and how much was burned flesh.

It was looking better as Thace cleaned the burns, though. That was... that was good.

Akira shook himself. Standing around worrying about Keith wasn't helping anyone. He knelt beside Keith, forcing down the nausea that rose at the sight of him in such a state. He tore his eyes away and looked to Thace. "How can I help?"

* * *

Meri was just about ready to throw down.

Elhete had appeared from nowhere, inserting herself beside Meri at her table in the commissary, and started talking about, as far as Meri could tell, some new farming technique that used Quintessence to speed up the harvest. Meri had let her ramble for about five minutes before she got fed up.

"Is there a reason you're so chatty this morning?" she grumbled, poking at the colorless sludge that passed for food in the Empire. "Or did you scramble your own brain instead of a prisoner's?"

Elhete stopped, setting her spoon down in a way that struck Meri as an implicit threat--though Elhete didn't have the presence to make it effective. "I thought you would be interested," she said, feigning confusion. "You certainly aren't here to learn how to handle prisoners. Perhaps plants are more your speed."

Meri's grip on her spoon tightened, and she growled--a foreign sensation, but one that had become increasingly familiar as she spent more and more time in a Galra body. She was tired, she was frustrated, she had nightmares every night about the prisoner she'd interrogated as part of her test, and Elhete's petty jabs were the last thing she wanted to deal with.

"Have you ever been to the front lines, Elhete?" Meri asked, keeping her voice cool.

Elhete's smile faded. It was only here, in the commissary, that any of the druids ever removed their masks--here and in the privacy of their own quarters. Elhete was younger than Meri would have guessed--no older than Lance, probably. It turned Meri's stomach. "That's why I'm here," Elhete said. "That's why we're all here. To learn how to serve the Empire. It might land us on the front lines, it might land us somewhere else. It depends on where Lady Haggar sees us having the most use."

Meri's lips quirked upward. "So that's a no, then." She pushed her plate away and stood. "I've killed more people than you could possibly fathom. I've watched worlds crumble. I've sentenced men to death with a single word." She leaned forward, invading Elhete's personal space and delighting in the way the other woman's eyes widened in fear. "If you think I can't stomach the dirty work, I'd be glad to give you a demonstration."

Before Elhete could rise to the challenge--and Meri desperately hoped she would; she could use a little decompression--Verrok appeared at Meri's shoulder, silent and imposing as the day he’d delivered Meri’s invitation to the interrogation room. He had his mask in place and his Quintessence raised in readiness for more direct action.

"Is there a problem here?" he asked in that rasping voice of his.

The fur along Meri's neck and arms stood on end, but she remained frozen, refusing to flinch. "Just having a spirited debate," she said dryly, staring Elhete down and daring her to disagree.

But Elhete just bowed her head in deference to the senior druid and murmured an agreement.

"Good," Verrok said. "Save your energy for the real enemy."

Meri pursed her lips, but she held her tongue as Verrok stared at her and at Elhete. She knew exactly who the real enemy was, but she'd gone and gotten herself stuck in a position where she couldn't fight back. Not directly.

So she waited, and when Verrok finally turned and walked away, Meri dumped the rest of her lunch in the trash and followed him. The shapeless panic from earlier may have subsided, but the restlessness that came with it was as strong as ever, and she was tired of waiting for the right opportunity. If she couldn't access Haggar's account to give Ulaz his clearance, maybe she could at least do the next best thing.

Verrok was high enough rank that his account probably had all sorts of interesting secrets to find.

* * *

_We have time._

Standing in the Black Lion's cockpit, her hands gripping the control pedestals as tightly as if she were engaged in a life-or-death battle, Allura felt the thought resonating in the air around her. Her mind was tied tightly with Shiro's, both of them looking across light-years to assess the situation on the homeworld.

They'd had to leave the castle-ship to get eyes on Lance and Keith, opening a wormhole to within a few systems of the Galra homeworld. Now that they were here, though, they could see as clearly as though they themselves had astrally projected into the Red Lion's cockpit. Keith rested on a cot at the back of the cockpit, Thace seated on the ground nearby. From the shapeless haze of Keith's thoughts, they gathered he was sedated, but Lance's frantically cycling anxiety was more than enough to fill in the holes.

Things were not good on the homeworld, but they had time to make plans. Keith was in stable condition, even if he wasn't going to be up and about any time soon. Lance, Thace, and Akira were all safe. There was a fleet in the sky Lance knew nothing about, and the adjunct bond gave Allura and Shiro very little insight into what Akira had seen as he flew in.

Allura impressed her presence on Lance's mind, willing him to recognize her and to know that help was coming. His thoughts quieted for a moment, and his brow furrowed. He'd recognized her, then, but he was second guessing himself. Considering the circumstances, Allura couldn't fault him.

Shiro echoed Allura's sentiment, reaching out to Lance first, but then to Keith, lingering in his mind for a long moment. Allura could feel him searching for a way to ease his suffering, and the awareness that they were powerless until they made it to the homeworld rankled them both.

 _Soon,_ Allura assured him.

Shiro acknowledged her promise, imparted another small degree of comfort to Keith, and then turned his gratitude toward Akira, though they both knew Akira couldn't sense them the same way Lance or Keith might.

Then they pulled back from the homeworld, settling once more into their bodies in the Black Lion. Shiro opened a wormhole at once, even as he began to turn over plans in his head.

"We'll wait for the Guard's report," he said. "Make sure Val and Nyma get some rest in the mean time. I have a feeling we're in for a tough fight."

* * *

Hunk felt pain with every step he took down Atsiphos's tunnels. It bled into the song, souring every note--slower and more somber now than they usually were. Hunk wasn't much of a musician, and even if he were, he doubted he could have transcribed the song. The only way he could think to describe the change was this: if the song, usually, was sung in major a key, then lately it had switched to minor.

"This is an improvement," Klex said as she led Hunk and Shay toward the newly-unearthed Migratory chambers near the heart of Atsiphos. She cocked her head as Hunk's disbelief overflowed into his song, and she offered him a weak smile. "Truly. We are not yet through the worst of it, I think, but we have discovered ways to contain the parasite."

"And you still have not been able to find records of the species within the Coalition's histories?" Shay asked. She was, if possible, even more heartbroken than Hunk at the state of things here. Hunk was frustrated, and he couldn't shake his guilt over what had happened--he was the one who had killed the robeast, after all, and even if he couldn't have known the Galra had brought it in to contain the parasite, that didn't change the fact that Hunk had broken the crude quarantine they had in effect.

Shay tried to soothe him again, as she had a dozen times since they'd heard about the parasite, but she couldn't disguise the ache in her song. She was sensitive to the Balmera's plight, more so than Hunk, and it physically pained her to be here. To feel the creatures devouring rock and crystal, to hear Atsiphos cry out in agony.

They'd freed her. That was the worst of it: they'd freed her, chased away the Galra who had been hurting her. That should have meant an end to her suffering. Instead, things were only getting worse.

"Are you sure there's nothing we can do to help?" Hunk asked, quickening his pace so he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Klex.

She smiled at him, her song weary. "You are helping," she said. "The others may not all believe in the Migrations of old, but I do. If you can find one, if you can learn from them what this parasite may be and how to rid our Balmera of it--that would be of more use to us than two more bodies assigned to the strengthening teams."

She was right, and Hunk knew it. The Elders had all been briefed on the efforts, and Shay had relayed the information to Hunk. So he knew--they weren't treating the infection so much as strengthening the Balmera so that she could fight off the invaders. It was slow going, but they already had teams of Balmerans from Metos and Theros rotating through to give the Atshiphos Balmerans a respite.

"Pax," Klex said, laying a hand on Hunk's arm. "It is a burden, but we have borne many burdens before. We will survive this."

"It is what we do," Shay said, resolve brightening her song. She and Klex shared smiles that spoke to a shared suffering. Both had been enslaved by the Empire. Both had watched their Balmera's slow decline. Both had lost friends and neighbors, but had clung to their stubbornness and their hope.

It was a pride Hunk couldn't share in, and his heart ached again at the reminder of what the Balmeran people had suffered--what so many of them were still suffering. He quieted his song, though, unwilling to let his sympathetic ache intrude on the moment. Shay and Klex both seemed to draw strength from the harmonies their songs created, and their pace was quicker as they continued on, down through tunnels that were beginning to show a bit of the warmth that had been absent during Atsiphos's years in Zarkon's hands. There were fewer decorations here than on Metos or Theros, and the crystallight didn't shine as brightly, but these tunnels had the distinct feel of home, rather than of captivity.

The light grew brighter the closer they got to the heart crystal, but they turned off the main passage before reaching the crystal chamber. Hunk had to stoop to get through the reinforced tunnel that led to the newest section of Migratory tunnels.

"We have reviewed the images from Metos and Theros," Klex said. "And we are certain that this is a new segment--a nursery, we suspect, and two other feeding grounds."

"Perfect timing, too," Hunk said, forcing cheer into his voice. "We just checked out the last location from the old list. Hopefully one of these will pan out."

"Something will eventually," Shay said firmly. "It is only a matter of finding where along the Migratory path the free Balmera are now." Doubt reverberated in her song, but she pressed her lips together and set up the holo-camera to capture the constellations in the first chamber, her motions quick and sure.

They were all hanging on the edge of despair, Shay more than most. Every location they visited with no signs of free Balmera chipped away at her hope a little more. Hunk had been imposing frequent breaks, trying to give Shay other things to focus on--things she could see real progress in when their hunt for free Balmera grew especially frustrating. Small projects on one of the Balmera, occasional rescue missions with the Guard. Even something as simple as cooking lessons helped, and had the added benefit of producing Shay’s preferred brand of comfort food.

"We'll find something sooner or later," Hunk agreed, resting his hand on her back and humming a soothing melody. She turned, her eyes shining, and he willed her to take some of his strength. "Don't give up yet."

* * *

"I can't keep doing this."

Akira stood, restlessness reverberating in every bone, and turned toward Lance, who had taken his place at Keith's bedside after Thace finished with the first aid. Thace himself hadn't moved for the last hour--nursing his own injuries or meditating or something; Akira wasn't quite sure. He was alert now, though, which confirmed that he hadn't actually been sleeping.

Urgency pounded inside Akira's head, unrelenting. He'd managed to stave it off for a while, between helping Thace treat Keith's wounds and ensuring the cave where they'd holed up was well-hidden and secure against potential Imperial patrols. But he'd run out of productive things to do, and the sense that there was something he should be doing had yet to leave him alone.

Lance stood and followed Akira to the ramp. "Where are you going?"

"Into town," Akira said. "I can't just sit here waiting for someone to find us."

"That sounds dangerous," Thace said. He remained seated, though, so Akira figured he sympathized, at least a little.

Lance grabbed his helmet off the ground, where he'd discarded it some time ago, and tapped it against his thigh. "Well, unless either of you are going to change your mind about making a run for orbit…"

"We can't." It pained Akira to admit it, but he knew exactly how lacking he was in the lion piloting department. Red felt sluggish under his hands, and he had a trail of busted-up buildings to prove it. Besides, he still didn't know how to work any of her weapons. If positions had been reversed--if Keith were up and able to fly, and someone else was injured--Akira would have thrown all his weight into the risky plan.

But as long as he was their only viable pilot, they were screwed. Akira wasn't cocky enough to think otherwise.

Lance saw the answer on his face and nodded, jamming his helmet down. "Right. So if we go back, we can at least figure out what's going on, and maybe get our hands on some better medical equipment."

"We?" Akira asked.

"I'm coming with you, obviously." Lance scoffed. "Please. You're not the only one going crazy just sitting here.

Akira hesitated, glancing to Thace.

"Go," Thace said. "I will keep watch here. I'm in no condition to hike across the city right now, much less fight, but... Lance is right. You should be able to find something more than our emergency supplies in the city, even if it's not a cryopod. Just be careful."

"Always am," Lance said, firing off a single finger gun in Thace's direction. His carefree smile faltered somewhat as his gaze fell once more on Keith, but he turned away quickly, heading down to Red's cargo bay and the hatch there that led to a one-man speeder. It was a tight fit for the two of them, but the space behind the driver's seat was serviceable as passenger space, if not exactly comfortable.

"I don't suppose you have somewhere you can pick up medical supplies quickly and easily," Akira said, leaning his arm on Lance's headrest.

Lance snorted. "What, are you kidding? Any kind of medicine is hard to find in the 301. Clinics have been shutting down all over the place because of how much even basic equipment costs. But if there's one thing I know for a fact, it's that the bigwigs in the governor's inner circle make damn sure they always have what they need."

Akira cocked his head to the side. "So... you're going to go back to the people who almost killed you a few hours ago and steal their medical equipment."

"For Keith?" Lance asked. "You're damn right I will."

A smile tugged at Akira's lips, and he gave Lance's shoulder a shove. "Now that's what I like to hear. You just point me in the right direction and I'll make sure you get where you need to go."

Lance grinned over his shoulder, and Akira settled in for the long flight back to town. It had taken only a few minutes to cover the distance in the Red Lion, but Red was in a class of her own. This speeder was faster than an average craft, for that matter, especially with Lance at the controls. Akira probably could have flown it--it didn’t seem to rely on the paladin bond the way Red did--but he was perfectly willing to leave it to someone with experience.

In the end, it only took them an hour to reach the edge of the dome. Lance found somewhere to stash the speeder for a few hours, and they set out on foot for the heart of the city and the government block that was their target.

It took about three blocks to notice them: images projected on every screen, disrupting news feeds and traffic reports and Imperial propaganda.

The Red Lion's face was everywhere, almost life-size in some cases, her eyes glowing as bright as the neon signs all around. Here and there images of Lance and Keith appeared in place of Red, the sigil painted on their paladin armor glowing as bright as a flame. Akira had noticed the sigil when he'd first arrived, though he didn't know what it meant and hadn't bothered to ask.

He suspected it meant something to the people here, though. The streets were largely empty along the route they were taking, but almost everyone they passed was watching the screens--some openly, some only darting glances at the images as they hurried along. Akira and Lance didn't linger long enough to hear what the general sentiment was, but Akira felt the crackle of anticipation in the air.

The 301 was a city on an edge, and the increasingly frazzled anchors who appeared now and again on the screens--hastily dismissing the efforts of a hacker to disrupt official broadcasts--said that Akira wasn't the only one who felt it.

"Arel's been busy," Lance muttered, shooting one last look at an image of himself before leading Akira down an alley. "I'd say I’m impressed except that all the attention is going to make our job harder."

Akira snorted, but for all Lance was trying to put a cheerful face on it, he was right--if they'd been hoping to sneak around the 301 unnoticed, that was looking less plausible with every block. Lance had grabbed a cloak from a corner stall to cover his armor, but that only did so much to camouflage him, and first one person, then another started to notice him in the shadows. They whispered to one another, stared, but whenever Lance looked their way, they only nodded to him or feigned disinterest.

"Looks like you've really made an impression on these people," Akira muttered, following close behind Lance as he boarded a train. Eyes turned their way, and Lance pressed a finger to his lips. In unison, nearly everyone turned back to what they had been doing--all except a young child who stared openly, clinging to her mother's hand. Lance tugged his hood lower and crouched beside her.

"You were on the holo," she said, more than a little star-struck.

"That's right." Lance poked her in the side, grinning as she flinched away and giggled. "And I'm probably gonna be on again soon, but I need to be quiet until then. Can you help me with that?"

She nodded, pressing a finger to her lips in an echo of Lance's gesture, and Lance retreated to Akira's side. Akira arched an eyebrow at him.

"Shut up," Lance said.

Akira only grinned, his nerves winding a little tighter with each stop. Most of the passengers fled at the first opportunity, and most newcomers backed out as soon as they spotted Lance and Akira inside. Within ten minutes, they were alone in this car, hurtling toward the center of the city.

"This is our stop," Lance said at last. He checked his cloak, flashed a smile at Akira, and headed out. "I hope you're ready. I have a feeling things are about to get difficult.”

* * *

Meri put her plan into action late that night. She'd followed Varrok to the archives room, trying to look casual as she listened for his credentials. Security on the _Eryth_ was bio-locked or voice activated--bio-locked for general clearance, voice keys for personal accounts. There wasn't much Meri could do about the bio-lock--if she could have faked that, she'd never have had to go through with Haggar's test in the first place.

But now that she had access to places like the archives, she might just stand a chance.

She just had to hope she hadn't lost her touch at impersonation. She hadn't had long to practice, but she'd been hearing Varrok's voice for several weeks now; she knew it better than she knew any voice but Haggar's.

She shifted her vocal cords as she entered the archives, reaching for a deeper register. A shift couldn't do everything for her, of course, but it got her to the right ballpark. From there it was just a matter of matching the subtler qualities of a voice. That wasn't to say it was easy, but it only took her a few tries before the computer verified the match and let her into Varrok's account.

She started digging at once, keenly aware of the silence around her and the door just behind her that could open at any moment. She hadn't seen any signs that the druids here kept odd hours; the younger ones were all kept on the same schedule for training, and while the senior members of the circle were left more or less to their own devices, they all seemed to conform to Haggar's schedule if they didn't have duties keeping them up through the night.

So odds were Meri wouldn't be interrupted.

She didn't like trusting the odds.

Varrok's account, at first glance, didn't hold much of interest. Prisoner records that Meri hadn't been granted access to, personal research logs--mostly to do with interrogation and Quintessential manipulation. It was all horrific, and Meri copied the files to the memory chip she kept hidden inside the Quintessence injector just in case, but she didn't waste time reading through them now.

There was only one project she really cared about, and she had no way of knowing whether or not Varrok was even involved. It was based off-site, that much she knew, but it was also one of Haggar's personal initiatives. It stood to reason that other members of her circle might be involved in the oversight of it.

Five minutes passed, and then ten. Meri had begun to adapt to Imperial computer systems since she began her career as a spy, but she still found them clunky and slow to navigate. They had none of the intuitive organization of old Altean systems, and whatever logic went into their design, Meri couldn't find it.

She kept looking, the minutes ticking away in the corner of the screen. It was hours yet before she expected anyone to be up, but she didn't like dawdling.

Then, finally, she found it. In a directory labeled for review, in which projects were organized by location, under the heading Jessaranti Asteroid Belt...

_Vindication._

Meri's heart skipped a beat, and she frantically opened the file, her eyes flying across the screen for whatever it could tell her. Prisoner lists, research reports, coordinates--the name alone, Jessaranti Asteroid Belt--would be invaluable, but Meri wasn't familiar with it, and she wouldn't be surprised if Haggar kept it out of official navigational records. Most things were buried under several layers of secrecy where Haggar was concerned, Meri was learning. She didn't want to run the risk that this was the same.

She started with the most recent entries: a note about a flaw in the design of the "master key," which was in need of reevaluation. _Master key malfunctioned during inaugural run. Subsequent tests suggest an incompatibility with the bond--possible overload? Decora recommends a neural rather than Quintessential design, which would sacrifice some auxiliary functions but keep the core functionality intact. The new design could be implemented within the movement._

Meri read the memo twice, searching for additional context that might clarify what they were talking about. Even without finding anything, it left a sour taste in her mouth. Anything _neural_ boded poorly for the test subjects involved, and all she could do was hope that Sam Holt hadn’t yet reached that stage of the experiments.

Footsteps approached in the hallway outside the archives door, and Meri hastily exited the system, logging into her own account instead--a precaution that proved to be pointless as the footsteps passed on.

Hands shaking now, Meri retraced her steps to get to the Vindication files and copied them over to her memory chip, then logged off the system altogether and returned to her room. Sleep was impossible to find with the information sitting heavy in the back of her mind, but she couldn't do anything more tonight.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow she would find an excuse to send a message back to Dez, or better yet, to leave the _Eryth_ and contact the castle directly from the privacy of her own ship.

Until then, she had to carry on as normal.

It was more important now than ever that she not jeopardize her place in Haggar's inner circle.

They needed to get Ulaz into Vindication, and soon.

* * *

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?" Mateo asked, leaning his elbows on the table.

Wyn bit down on a grin as Maka shot Mateo a venomous look. "Of course I do. Look, I've almost got it."

Mateo raised an eyebrow and tapped one finger against his chin, but it was Rowan who voiced what he was probably thinking.

_What are the odds he's just fiddling with random dials until something happens, do you think?_

Wyn bit his tongue to keep from smiling as Maka frowned, then smacked the casing of their new radio. Maka said it was finished, thanks to some pointers from the visiting rebel intelligence agent, Arel, before he left, and some parts stolen from Bee's workshop in the middle of the night.

Wyn, for his part, wasn't convinced. He wasn't as good with this stuff as Maka was, his memory being what it was. Rowan was a little bit better about remembering what did what, but he wasn't interested in intercepting Imperial broadcasts like the rest of them. Kept warning Wyn that he was poking at things that were better left alone, as though they were somehow safer not knowing what was happening in the rest of the universe.

Mateo opened his mouth, but he'd only gotten as far as breathing in before Maka popped up from behind the radio and leaned across the table to press a finger to Mateo's lips. Mateo's lips quirked upward, but he stayed quiet.

"I've _got_ this," Maka said. "I just need to--ha!"

The electronic hum that had been filling the room suddenly cleared, replaced with a garbled transmission that was more static than words. Mateo leaned forward, suddenly interested again, as Maka dropped into his seat and started fine-tuning the frequency. Rowan was a bundle of discontented nerves in the back of Wyn's head, and he kept trying to nudge Wyn toward the door, like he thought Wyn might actually leave right when the last few months' worth of hard work was about to pay off.

The transmission abruptly cleared, a nasally voice already halfway through a report.

_\--Project Robeast continues to yield dividends. Reports say there are already a hundred finished super-weapons in the field, with an unspecified number ready to be launched later this year--_

Wyn's chest went tight, the sensation oddly distant, like someone wasn't squeezing the breath out of him so much as squeezing _him_ out of his body. The static on the radio crested to a roar in his ears, drowning out whatever else might have been said.

Then, silence.

"Hey! What happened?"

"You must have bumped something--watch your feet!"

"I am!"

"Well then-- Uh, Wyn? You okay?"

_No._

Wyn tried to respond, but he couldn't make himself talk. His feet moved on their own to pick him up and carrying toward the door, even as his Quintessence snapped around his fingers, sprawling and restless like--

Oh.

Oh, Rowan had said something about this.

Wyn's vision went momentarily dark as he automatically tried to shove his brother to the forefront, but Rowan wasn't there, and Wyn wasn't in control anyway.

His stomach lurched as he thought that, but the lurch only brought the otherness into focus. Rowan had said there were others in here, it was just that Wyn wasn't usually around when they came out. He was around now, though, and he knew what it felt like when someone else was in control.

At least... he thought he did. It wasn't as clean-cut as with Rowan, to the point that Wyn almost couldn't be sure that he wasn't just imagining things. Maybe he was still in control, and he was just panicking because the voice on the radio had said--

Leth.

That was what Rowan had called them, the one who always pushed Rowan away when they woke up. Rowan didn't know much about them, but he knew that they were the one who could fiddle with machines, the way Wyn had--Leth had--during the battles at Arus and at Earth.

They way they had just now, when they'd panicked and turned off the radio.

 _Leth?_ Wyn asked.

But he got no answer, no matter how he tried to reach out to the person in control of his body. All he could do was hold on and try not to panic as Leth took them back to their room, turned off all the lights with a thought, and locked themself in the bathroom.

The panicked breathing of a stranger filled the air, now Wyn’s, now Leth’s, until neither of them could see the line that separated one from the other.

* * *

The Yellow Lion emerged from her wormhole into the middle of an unmapped asteroid field.

Shay let out a cry as she leaned back in her chair, pressing her palms more firmly to the contact panel on the dashboard. Yellow veered hard to one side, but her back end still clipped a nearby asteroid, and Shay felt an echo of pain--surprise more than pain, perhaps, except that Hunk had been unprepared for the maneuver and had been thrown against his restraints, the force of it wrenching his shoulder.

Shay spared him a silent apology, but the asteroids were yet close together here, and it took most of her concentration to navigate among them.

Then, at last, she spotted open sky and dove toward it, her heart pounding. They emerged from the asteroid field, and Shay let Yellow coast as she pressed a hand to her sternum and attempted to steady her breathing.

"That's not supposed to be here," Hunk said. His voice was as shaky as Shay's breathing, but he reassured her through the bond that he was uninjured before she could form a coherent thought. "Just surprised," he said. "Nice flying."

Shay managed a smile, but she felt no humor. She turned Yellow around and surveyed the asteroids, something cold and uncertain settling into her song. Hunk was not wrong--there had been nothing in any records about an asteroid belt in this region, or indeed any planets or planetoids that might have given rise to it.

Hunk saw the direction her thoughts had turned and shuddered.

"No, hey," he said, reaching out to grab her wrist. "We don't know that."

"What else could this be?" Shay asked. "There should not be anything here _except_ Balmera."

Balmera the Empire would have been hunting. Perhaps Zarkon had caught a Migration as it passed through here. Perhaps he had tried to take them. It must have been long after he first turned on Shay's people, and those of the Migration had known what he intended. They had fought, and they had been destroyed. The Empire had no doubt picked through the debris for crystals or any other useful materials, and time and the vacuum of space had destroyed whatever other signs there may have been of the beings who had died here, until all that remained was cold, barren rock.

Hunk squeezed her wrist, and she wrenched her mind out of these dark thoughts to meet his eyes.

"We don't know that," he said again, firmly. "Let's not jump to any conclusions."

The words were undermined somewhat by the fear that echoed hers in the bond, but Shay did her best to listen. Hunk was right, even if neither of them believed that there was another explanation.

They should at least search the area and see what they could find. Proof of a lesser disaster or something by which to remember the forgotten victims of Zarkon's empire.

So Shay urged Yellow forward, her heart in her throat, and tried not to think about what she might find.

* * *

Val was cursing as she dragged herself out of the river for the sixth time running.

"Blue, come on!" she called to the sky. "What's the problem? This isn't where you brought me before!"

There was no answer, of course. Wherever this was, it wasn't actually Blue's Heart. Val was more and more sure of that with every passing second. This river, with its swift current and steep banks and the dappled sunlight peeking through the trees, was the first place she'd ever come in the astral realm, and she'd always assumed it was the Heart. That was what Meri and Lance said, and she figured they knew more about this sort of thing than her, but it had become clear that none of them were experts on the subject.

They were all just trying to figure things out as they went.

That didn't help Val with her current dilemma, of course. She'd been buzzing ever since she returned from her astral roadtrip with Nyma and got confirmation that it had been more than a weird dream.

She'd traveled.

Across whole galaxies.

To _Lance_.

It wasn't precisely what she'd been hunting for all these weeks. She was pretty sure it was the paladin bond that had led her to Lance, and she didn't have that with Sam, or Rolo, or Rax. And she hadn't physically been there. She hadn't been able to talk to Lance, or help him.

But it was proof that she could use her bilocation to find a specific person across vast distances, if only she had some way to identify them.

As long as she was here, she tried it again: hold Lance in her mind's eye, try to call up the bond, follow it out into the nebulous distance... however distance worked here. She'd taken herself to Matt and Allura when they'd all been on the astral plane, but she was only vaguely aware of how she'd done it. Finding Matt had been more or less an accident, and she was pretty sure Allura had been calling to her, or the Black Lion had.

There was just some trick to it, that was all. She had time to figure it out, too--she would still have to figure out the trick of familiarity, to see if she could focus in on Sam or Rolo. (Rolo first, maybe. It might be easier to use the bond and borrow Nyma's familiarity.)

Later. For now, she just wanted to get back to Lance. She figured he was her best bet, after all. She'd already found him once, he was her cousin, _and_ he was a fellow Blue. Any way you sliced it, she should have been able to pick him out from the universe without a problem.

Except she couldn't.

She held on to the astral realm for as long as she could, searching, straining, but this place was always fleeting. Whether because she didn't actually have Blue to ground her here, or because she was still tired from the impromptu visit to the homeworld, she wasn't sure, but she never seemed able to stay here longer than five or ten minutes. She should have been resting, as Nyma was, just in case Shiro and Allura made the call to move on the homeworld. But she couldn't. She couldn't stop thinking about the lighthouse on the island in the middle of the sea. That was Blue's _true_ Heart; she was sure of it. And since that was the only place she'd actually projected from, it stood to reason that she would have to make it back there if she wanted to do it again.

Problem was, she couldn't figure out how to _get_ there.

It all boiled down to familiarity.

Nyma was waiting when she returned to the physical plane this time. Val was aware of her presence before she was completely aware of herself, and she felt a blush rise in her cheeks even as she blinked away the fog of the astral realm.

"Hey," she said, flashing an innocent smile. "Didn't hear you come in."

Nyma arched one eyebrow artfully, not moving from her perch on the dashboard in front of Val. She had one leg crossed over the other at the knee, her foot kicking idly, and she leaned back on her hands, intense violet eyes pinning Val to the seat back. "Did you even try to sleep?"

Val cringed, but she refused to be cowed. "This is more important."

For a moment, Nyma looked like she had something to say to that, but instead, she only blew out a sigh and stared at the ceiling. "What are you even doing, Val?"

"Trying to get back to Lance." She hurried on before Nyma could say anything. "Don't you get it? This is what we've been looking for! If I can get back to Lance--if I can do this on purpose and not just when Blue is panicking--then what's to stop me from taking us to Rolo?"

Nyma's breath caught in her throat, and Val suddenly realized the idea hadn't occurred to her before now. She went rigid, her fingers curling tighter around the edge of the console, her eyes locked on Val.

"I... I haven't figured it out yet," Val admitted, anxiety curdling in her gut. "I've been trying to repeat it from the Heart, and from here, but I can't get back to the lighthouse. I'm not really sure that it was the lighthouse that did it, but it's not working anywhere else. And I mean, we'd still have to figure out how to lock on to Rolo. The bond should help with that, or we could try a mind meld. But I figure we want to know I can project at will before we try to add on that layer, and I just... Are you okay?"

Nyma's head snapped up. She'd started to collapse in on herself, her hand reaching up to cover her mouth. Even now, Val could see tears gathering in her eyes and a desperate hope rising behind them. "I'm fine," she whispered. "Are you...?" She stopped herself with a scowl, then pushed off the dashboard and held her hands out to help Val up. "Later."

"But--"

" _Later_ ," Nyma repeated. "Lance and Keith need us to be at our best, and that means you need to rest. We'll figure the rest out when we can give it the attention it deserves."

Val wanted to argue. She was so, _so_ close. If she could just figure this out, she would have it--she knew it. This was what the sage had been hinting at back on Oriande; there was nothing else it could have been. She just had to keep at it until things clicked, and then...

And then Shiro and Allura would call them to battle, and Val would be tired and distracted, and that might cost someone their life.

Chest tight, she let Nyma pull her to her feet. She could see the same conflict playing out on Nyma's face. She wanted this, too, probably even more than Val did. Rolo was her family, had been basically her entire _world_. She would do just about anything to get him back.

But she was putting Lance and Keith first, because she cared and because she knew how much the rest of this team cared. Val squeezed her hand, nodding as Nyma met her eyes.

"This will work," she said. "You're right; this isn't the time for it. But later, when we do have time?" She pulled Nyma to a stop at the bottom of Blue's ramp, willing Nyma to feel her certainty. "We're going to find him."

* * *

Pidge was the first to see the message.

They had alerts set up within the castle's messaging system to ping them as soon as anything came through on the Accords' channels or using their encryption. Coran was busy helping Shiro, Allura, and the Guard figure out what was going on over in the region of the homeworld at the moment, so Pidge pulled the message up on their own screen, trying to fight down a surge of hope. It was probably just an update from Dez, offering a few helpful tidbits about Zarkon's plans. Useful, but not what Pidge had been hoping for.

They froze as soon as they opened the file and recognized Meri's identifier--the code phrase with which she opened the message.

_I'm still trying to gain access to the project, but this couldn't wait._

_Jessaranti Asteroid Belt._

_I don't have coordinates, but that's where Vindication is based._

_Good luck._

Pidge's heart was pounding as they slapped at the comms panel, shaking fingers bringing up several error messages before they managed to call up Shiro's frequency.

He answered at once. "Pidge? What's wrong?"

"I--" Pidge faltered, the words sticking in their throat. Shit. Keith, and Lance. "Shit, Shiro. I know this is a bad time. I know you're going to need me, but I--Meri just sent a message."

There was a muffled voice from the other end of the line--Allura, repeating Meri's name.

"It was bare bones," Pidge said quickly. "But she--Shiro, I think she found out where my dad's being held."

Dead silence. Pidge stared at Meri's message again, tears prickling at their eyes.

Coordinates.

They needed coordinates.

Pidge lurched for the keyboard, running a search for Jessaranti Asteroid Belt on the nav archives and on everything they'd pulled from Galra systems.

"Are you sure?" Shiro asked, breathless.

Pidge let out a pitiful laugh. "Not at all. But Meri says that's where Vindication is based, and the video we saw on Renxora said my dad was transferred _to_ Vindication almost a year ago. I _have_ to check it out."

The computer beeped.

A record popped up: Jessaranti Asteroid Belt. Eighty-five percent possibility that it was an alternate designation for a location more commonly referred to by its Imperial Code, V-28-BYK. Pidge could work with that. The conversion from IC to Altean coordinates was convoluted, but they'd more or less worked it out.

"Go," Shiro said.

Pidge swallowed the lump of emotion that lodged in their throat. "Are you sure?"

"We'll handle things on the homeworld. Take Ryner. Take Matt."

"No." Pidge breathed to steady themself, trying to calm their racing heart. "We can't go in with no intel." God, they wanted to charge in there today, reconnaissance be damned, but they knew it was a bad idea. "It's not fair to Matt to have him pulled between Dad and Keith, anyway. I'll take Ryner. We'll scope it out. Hopefully by the time we're ready to make our move, you’ll have Keith and Lance back safe on the castle."

Shiro breathed in, paused. "Okay. Be careful, and call the _second_ things go south."

Pidge ended the call without another word, then called Ryner as they sprinted for the elevator down to Green's hangar. "Ryner?" they said. "Meet me at Green. I've got a lead on Dad."

* * *

The carnage stretched on as far as the eye could see. Chunks of stone and ice blended into the starry backdrop in the distance, or were swallowed by the light of the nearby sun. Hunk's stomach curdled just looking at it, and that was with a constant refrain in his head trying to convince himself that these weren't bits of pulverized Balmera.

The Empire didn't have anything powerful enough to reduce Balmera to this state, anyway. There would have been something left, surely.

There were crystals, though. Not many of them, and not often, but here and there Yellow picked up Quintessential anomalies on her scans, and they traced them back to small bodies with a handful of broken crystals poking out of fissures in the stone.

"These are Balmera crystals," Shay said after the third find. She'd stopped Yellow and gone out to retrieve a sample. She'd been convinced before she made it back to the cockpit, Hunk knew, but she waited until she could pull a glove off to examine it more closely. The bond throbbed with grief for the unknown Balmera and her inhabitants.

"There's still Quintessence in them," Hunk said, his tongue like lead in the back of his throat. He didn't want to say anything, but they needed to know what had happened here. "That's... That means this was recent, doesn't it? I don't know how quickly crystals would lose their charge out here, but it wouldn't last for thousands of years, would it?"

Shay shook her head. "It would not last even for _one_ year. I could not say exactly how long it would take, but..."

She trailed off, but her guilt was plain to read in the bond. If this had happened within the last year--within the last few months, maybe--then it was almost certainly in retaliation for what Voltron had done in freeing Metos, Theros, and now Atsiphos. Maybe it had been a Migration that the Empire had found first. Maybe they had dragged dying Balmera here for some sort of execution.

Either way, it was a message.

It was on the far side of the sun that they found the worst of it, though. Confirmation, at last, that they'd been right in their assumption, however much they'd hoped to the contrary.

A Balmera.

Unlike the rest of the debris strewn around the system, this Balmera was still mostly whole--the corpse of the great creature drifting slowly, its orbit collapsing and pulling it toward the sun. An enormous chunk was missing from one side, the wound so deep it left a hollow pit exposed, with a dark, shattered crystal glittering in the light of the star.

Hunk's blood ran cold as Shay fought not to be sick.

"That's--"

Shay's song took a turn for the frantic, and that stopped Hunk's words in his mouth.

He couldn't unthink it though, and the knowledge reverberated between them, cold and horrific on a level that surpassed everything else they'd seen today. He said nothing else as he placed an urgent call to the castle-ship, attaching a video file of the carnage, focusing heavily on the last Balmera they’d found.

Coran's face was pale when he returned the call.

Hunk could watch the entire procession of emotions across his face as the images played out, and it made his heart sink a little more with each change. First came shock, and Hunk wondered whether he should have prepared Coran for what he was about to see. He doubted anything could prepare someone for something like this, though.

After the shock came grief, but only for a moment before it was swallowed by the realization and the horror.

"I know what it looks like," Hunk said, his voice low. "I've seen the pictures of the homeworld. But it can't--I mean, you said it yourself, no one's seen one in ten thousand years, and Haggar hasn't had the egg nearly long enough for it to get this big… Right?"

Coran wetted his lips. "I certainly hope you're right," he said. "And by all means, you should be. There shouldn't be a Vkullor out there to hunt Balmera."

The name sparked a chill in Hunk's chest, but it was Shay who shivered, wrapping her arms around herself and letting out a soft, keening note.

"You're certain this was recent?" Coran asked, clearly aiming for comfort.

Hunk lifted his gaze to the stars. They'd withdrawn a short distance from the killing grounds, but he could still see the image hovering behind his eyelids. "There’s still Quintessence, Coran," he said. "In the core crystal, but also in the smaller fragments. Shay says it wouldn't last long in a vacuum."

"It wouldn't. Quiznak." Coran raised a hand to his chin, smoothing his mustache as he thought. After a moment, he shook his head and met Hunk's gaze. "We can't jump to any conclusions. It does indeed look like a Vkullor attack, but that may be deliberate. Zarkon has never been above a fear tactic."

"You think?" Hunk asked. It wasn't much more comforting, the idea that Zarkon had some other weapon capable of this kind of destruction. But he would take just about anything over an actual Vkullor.

Coran smiled, feeble though it was. "It's a very real possibility, and we can't allow ourselves to panic until we know more. I'll ask the Accords to look into it, sort through recent distress calls. If it's not too much trouble, can I have you bring some samples back with you?"

Hunk glanced at Shay, then nodded. "I'll go out and grab what I can. We'll be headed back your way soon."


	39. Likur Heist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Allura, Shiro, and Matt are trying to plan a rescue mission for Keith and the others, who are stranded on the Galra homeworld, but they can't do anything until the Guard gathers more information. Val nearly worked herself to exhaustion in an attempt to figure out the trick of bilocation that allowed her to take herself and Nyma to the homeworld. Nyma stopped her, promising her there would be time to work out the kinks after they got Keith, Lance, and the others home safe. In the mean time, Lance and Akira have ventured out from the Red Lion's hiding spot, heading back into the 301 in search of medical supplies to help Keith. 
> 
> Elsewhere in the universe, Rax and Rolo haven't seen Sam in days. Rolo has been searching the entire complex for him, while Rax resigned himself to the fact that Sam may simply be dead. They argued, and when Rolo next returned to the cell, Rax had been taken by the guards.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late posting. Work has been kicking my ass this week. I also want to give a humongous shout-out to everyone who's left reviews on the last several chapters. I haven't had the physical or mental energy to reply to all of them, but please know that every single one of them has brightened my day. Y'all are the best.

Pain gnawed at the edges of Thace's mind. Dull and throbbing and then suddenly sharp, it pricked at him, shredding his concentration. He knew if he gave into the pain, even once, he would lose himself. He had seen to his wounds already, and he knew exactly how bad they were--not as severe as what he'd suffered on the day he fled the Empire, but bad enough that he ought not be fighting any time soon.

But they sank their claws in, phantom pains as much in the past as in the present. From the moment he’d walked into the atrium to find his nephew lying among the rubble, burnt and bleeding, he’d walked an edge. Treating Keith’s wounds had grounded him. Consulting with Lance and Akira on where to hide to best protect them all had kept him in the moment. But the roar of explosives and the chill of space and the horrifying void of sound and sensation still lurked at the edges of his mind.

He’d almost died to an explosion once.

He’d have endured it a hundredfold if it could have prevented Keith suffering the same.

A hitch in Keith's breathing dragged Thace once more out of the agonized haze he'd fallen into after Lance and Akira left, and he struggled upright, blinking tired eyes and crossing to Keith's bedside.

"Lance?" Keith murmured.

Thace placed his hand on the top of Keith's head and combed his fingers through his hair. "Lance isn't here right now, I'm afraid. Just me."

Keith stared at him for a long moment, seemingly slow to process Thace's words. His brow furrowed, but he leaned into Thace's touch as he breathed out a huff. That would be the pain medication Thace had found in the emergency kit. It was Altean in origin--designed to be used by as many species as possible, no doubt. In Alteans, perhaps it didn't have such a strong soporific effect. They would have wanted the paladins to remain alert while waiting for rescue, after all.

In Galra, though, it was as much sedative as analgesic, and Keith had spent most of the last four hours drifting on the edge of sleep. Sometimes he was aware of Thace's company, sometimes not.

At least he wasn't in pain.

Thace made himself comfortable on the ground beside Keith's cot and continued to stroke his hair, rumbling deep in his chest in an attempt at a soothing song. He had little practice with children, and Keith was far too old for such simple comforts, anyway. Had he been fully lucid, he likely would have been offended at the insinuation, but given the situation it was all Thace could offer him.

He was here--wounded, exhausted, and with extremely limited resources--but he would fight to his final breath if it came to it. A lullaby was a small price to pay.

* * *

Lance pulled Akira to a stop just before the mouth of an alley.

Akira glanced back at him, adrenaline pounding in his veins. "What?"

Lance hesitated for a moment, his eyes on the city skyline. "I have a plan."

"I was kinda banking on that," Akira said. "Because I definitely don't."

A twitch of the lips, quickly fading. "It's not a very _good_ plan."

"Define 'good.'"

Lance hesitated for a long moment, then finally tore his eyes away from the sky to look at Akira. "Okay, so we need medical equipment, right?"

"Right…?" Akira cocked his head to the side, trying to figure out where Lance was going with this. They'd already discarded the notion of stealing medicine, even if they found a cache in Vit’s own bedroom. Neither of them knew what Keith needed, and taking the wrong thing would be less than useless. That left medical equipment--something like the cryopods or the local healing units they had on the castle-ship. "So?"

Lance scratched the back of his neck. "So, where are we going to get it?"

"Military hospital?" Akira guessed. "Your rebel friends? I don't know."

"Even if I knew how to get in touch with the resistance at this point, it would take too long for them to track down what we need."

Akira shook his head, equal parts fear and anticipation rising at the grim smile Lance wore. "Okay. I take it this is where your plan kicks in?"

"You got it." Lance pointed across the street to a slender silver tower. It wasn't as imposing as the building where Akira had found Keith and Lance earlier, but it looked nearly as pretentious with all that glasswork, filigree, and hundreds of crystals visible inside, sparkling like oversized purple stars. "Private facility. Technically open to everyone, but let's be real here: no one can pay for that kind of care. It mostly gets used by Imperial officials and CEOs and whatever. They'll have the best equipment, though."

Akira turned his head a fraction to give Lance an unimpressed look, and Lance flushed.

"Look, if you want fast, this is the best bet."

"Oh, no, I know," Akira said, holding up his hands. "I'm just disappointed that we aren't sneaking into Vit's penthouse or whatever."

Lance cracked a smile at that, though it seemed strained. "I mean… There's a chance Vit's in there right now. I did blow him up, kind of."

“Awesome,” Akira said. “But also? Shit. How bad do you think security will be?”

“Bad.” Lance chuckled. “Beyond that, I couldn’t tell you.”

Well, that could pose some problems. Akira studied the clinic again, this time watching for movement through the windows. If they were lucky, the clinic wouldn’t want a whole bunch of soldiers tromping around and getting in the way. Vit would have a private security team if he was there, of course. Maybe a larger unit to patrol the entire floor. But that could be all. Maybe.

Akira didn’t like to trust his luck.

"Do we at least know what we're looking for?"

"There should be portable healing units," Lance said. "Mirek managed to get her hands on one a few months ago, so I know what it looks like." He splayed his hands, hooking his fingers. "Kinda like a giant spider with a big glass bulb full of liquid Quintessence on its back. They're called... likurs or something? Which, if I understand the etymology right, that’s a reference to some local creature that was used in, like, Dark Ages-type medical bullshit. It's basically like calling them leeches."

Akira's eyebrows shot up. "Lovely mental image."

"Yeah. But it's almost as powerful as a cryopod, and it's small enough that we can carry it out without sacrificing our ability to fight."

And that was about as much as they could hope for, all things considered. Akira checked the pistol holstered at his side, took a deep breath to steady himself, then nodded to Lance. "Let's do it."

* * *

Rolo sat vigil with Rax as the druids carried out their experiments. This was a new lab. Newly-converted, at least, because Rolo had been all over this base, and he hadn't ever noticed activity in this area. It was within his range, but just barely. Maybe if he hadn't been pushing himself so hard lately in his search for Sam he could have done something more.

Then again, what would he have done? He recognized enough of this tech to know they were working toward separating Rax’s Quintessence from his body, so any technopathy would just get blamed on Rax, and Rolo couldn't have stomached that. He could barely stand to watch. The fact that they were moving forward with Rax after so long of almost no progress either meant they finally had the staff and resources to pick up the pace, or they were nearly done connecting Rolo to his shell.

The possibility chilled him to the core, but there was nothing he could do about it. Sam was gone, maybe forever. Rolo couldn't risk lashing out unless he wanted Rax to suffer the consequences.

All he could do was sit here and watch and hope that, when they finally finished, Rax didn't just drift away. Rolo remembered too well the hallucinations he'd experienced when he was here. He remembered how easy it would have been to just… fade. He wondered if the fact that Rax had grown up under the Empire's thumb, had grown resigned to captivity and suffering, would work in his favor, or if he would simply accept the end when it was offered to him.

Rolo hugged his knees to his chest as he watched the druids work. He wouldn't exactly call what he and Rax had a close friendship, but at least they weren't alone. Rolo wasn't sure what he would do if he lost Sam and Rax both. He wasn't sure he was strong enough to survive that.

"Hang in there, Rax," Rolo whispered to no one. Guilt stirred half-heartedly in his gut, but he was too tired to care. Maybe it was selfish to hope that Rax held on. Maybe he should have been hoping for Rax to finally find relief from all of this.

But he wouldn't lie to himself.

He didn't want to be alone.

The Sentinel stirred at the fringes of Rolo's awareness as though to remind him that he wasn't alone, but that only made his heart sink all the more. Everything felt tight, like he'd been stuffed inside a body that was too small to contain him. Ironic, considering he wasn't in his body at all at the moment.

Rax breathed out a small gasp of pain, and Rolo's eyes went to him at once. There was nothing he could do. He kept having to remind himself of that before he went and pushed himself too far and ended up passed out back in the cell when Rax needed him most.

Just a little longer.

It took more time than Rolo anticipated, and he was zoning out by the time things actually changed. The weariness, the Sentinel, the hovering gloom of the future, Sam's absence and the way it made the silence seem so oppressive--all this closed in around Rolo so much that he almost didn't notice when the pressure in the room changed.

It wasn't a physical sensation; nothing about the room had actually changed except that the druids had all moved over to screens and were murmuring together about whatever it was they saw.

No, this was much closer to what Rolo felt when the Sentinel's attention turned his way: the weight of eyes on him, the pressure of another presence sharing his space. There was no malice in this presence, though, only sorrow. Rolo stood, searching for Rax, but his presence was too nebulous. He supposed this was what Sam had seen when Rolo was drifting. Rax was no longer in his body, but his mind hadn't taken on a concrete form. It was stagnant in the air, idle in the machines around them. Rolo reached out, and he could almost sense Rax's mind there.

Then, in a rush, the presence condensed, and Rax was standing beside him, staring down at his own body with a look on his face like he wanted to be sick.

"It's okay, Rax," Rolo said, stepping up beside him. He didn't reach out for him; not yet. Rax looked too close to panic. It was best to take things slow.

Rax spun all the same, his eyes going wide as he saw Rolo standing there. He looked to the druids, raised his arms as though expecting an attack. Rolo raised his own hands in a calming gesture, fighting to keep his voice even.

"It's okay. They can't see us."

Rax's head swiveled again, his breath turning shallow. "What? What do you mean? What is-- What is this?"

"Short version? They separated our consciousness from our bodies." Rolo reached out slowly to pass his hand through a monitor mounted on a stand nearby. "We're not actually in the physical world, I don't think. I… Shit, man. I don't know. Sam seemed to have a better grasp of this stuff than I do. I wish you could hear all this from him. But the important thing is, they don't know about this." He gestured to the druids. "And that means we've got the advantage."

"What advantage?" Rax demanded. "We are prisoners--test subjects! What can we do to them?"

A smile tugged at Rolo's lips, and he waved Rax over to the side of the room, where they could sit out of sight of the druids and Rax's own body. "Come on," he said. "I'll explain everything, but it's kind of a long story."

* * *

Keith was… cold.

It wasn't…

It wasn't cold around him.

It wasn't like being out in the endless blizzard on Revinor or coming out of a cryopod.

 _He_ was cold.

He was cold, and he was alone.

Confused images flashed through his head. Lance, standing over him. Smoke in the air. Thace humming, the low lights of Red's cockpit all around him. Shiro, somewhere, insubstantial, pulling him into a hug he thought should have hurt.

Keturah.

It was Keturah's presence that clued him into the dreams. He wasn't really asleep, he didn't think. Thinking was hard, and time kept skipping around in odd leaps that left him disoriented. One minute Lance had been there, but when Keith called out for him, someone told him he wasn't there.

But most of that was real.

He thought it was real.

Then he saw Keturah, saw her standing inside the hangar of a Galra ship with her hair disheveled and her eyes flaming as she stared at Zarkon and Zarkon stared at her, both of them refusing to back down.

A stab of pain, so sharp it jolted Keith out of the dream. The humming faltered.

The humming?

"Keith? Can you hear me?"

Thace.

Keith struggled to put things in order. Lance was gone. Akira… Had Akira been here, or was that part of the dream, too? Didn't matter now. It was just Thace here, and he'd been humming. (Keith thought he'd been humming for a while, but he'd only noticed the silence that followed, so it was hard to be sure.)

"Keith?"

Keith opened his eyes, and an image of Thace swam before him, refusing to come into focus no matter how Keith squinted.

A hand slipped into his.

"Can you squeeze my hand? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me."

That was easier. Easier than… than talking, or thinking, or any of it. So Keith squeezed, and the other hand squeezed back.

"Are you in pain?"

Pain? Keith remembered pain. That was what had woken him, wasn't it? ... _Was_ it?

There was no pain now.

Thace kept talking, but Keith was wandering again, the bed beneath him rocking like the deck of a boat he'd seen in someone else's memories. He wanted it to stop.

The dreams bled back in slowly, an ache taking root in his chest. Keturah was there again, and Zarkon, and Lealle, and Alfor. He knew them all, intimately. He'd loved them.

He saw himself, then, small and broken, and that same love redoubled.

 _ **Rest,**_ a voice said. _**I will protect you.**_

* * *

Word came less than three hours after Nyma finally dragged Val away to rest.

They were ready to strike.

Val was on her feet before Shiro had finished speaking, turning several complete circles before remembering that she was in Nyma's room--Nyma apparently not trusting her not to sneak off again if left unsupervised. Which… fair.

"When?" Val asked, sprinting for the bathroom before remembering that Nyma didn't own a brush. She turned on the ball of her foot and found Nyma sitting on the side of the bed, dragging her hands down her face.

"Lieutenant Layeni's scrambling the Guard now," Shiro said. "Can you and Nyma meet us in the conference room in five?"

"We'll be there," Val said. She ended the call and went to pocket the comms unit before it hit her that this was Nyma's comms unit. Props to Shiro for not reacting--though to be fair, he and Matt had probably answered each other's comms more often than Val realized. "You catch that?" Val asked Nyma.

Nyma raised a hand and muttered an acknowledgement, and Val sprinted next door to her own room to brush her hair and put it up in a sloppy bun. She was changed into her armor in under two minutes and emerged just as Nyma lifted her hand to knock.

Val went up on her toes and kissed Nyma, quick and chaste. "Thanks."

She didn't elaborate, and Nyma was still groggy enough that she may not have picked up on the nuance of what Val was trying to say, but there was no time for more. The upcoming battle already pounded in Val's veins, chasing away her lingering fatigue. She wasn't fully rested and she knew it, but she was a million times better off than she would have been if she'd spent the last three hours dipping in and out of the astral realm trying to make her bilocation do something it wasn't intended to do.

They were pushing seven minutes by the time they made it through the extra security measures in place around the conference room, and Shiro and Allura were already waiting, along with Matt and Layeni.

"Just us, then?" Val asked, taking a seat at the table. She didn't know how to feel about that. The homeworld couldn't be too heavily guarded if they hadn't called the rest of the team back to help. Still, Val would have felt better about all this if they'd had all the big guns.

Shiro and Allura traded looks.

"We received a message from Meri about an hour ago," Allura said. "Brief, but high priority. She may have discovered a lead on Pidge's father."

Beside Val, Nyma stiffened, and Val reached out to take her hand. "Really?" Val squeaked.

Shiro nodded. "There wasn't enough information to know how current a lead this is, but Pidge and Ryner went to check it out."

"We're going to go back them up as soon as we get Keith and Lance to safety," Matt said. His face was gaunt in a way Val had attributed to Keith's predicament, but she saw now that it ran much deeper than that. He offered a smile, but it didn't reach his eyes. "For now, it's just recon, so we aren't going to be much help. We’ll have to focus on this job first."

Val nodded, squeezing Nyma's hand. She wondered if Coran had mentioned anything to Pidge about the Delegate's note before they left. About the possibility that Rolo was being held with Sam. Not without Nyma's permission, probably, but the fact that Pidge might even now be headed to where they were both being held changed things.

"Okay," Val said. "Are Hunk and Shay going to be joining us?"

"For now, assume no." Shiro called up a holographic map of the Galra homeworld as he spoke. "They found something while they were searching for a Balmera Migration. I'm not sure what yet; Coran seemed… distracted." He glanced at Allura again, then shook his head. "They know about the situation on the homeworld, and they'll come if they can, but apparently whatever they found isn't something they can just ignore."

"That's okay," Layeni said. "You've seen my men's reports. There is an Imperial presence on Daibazaal, but not so much that we can't handle it."

Allura straightened, settling into the business of planning a battle strategy. "Lieutenant Commander Layeni is correct. Val, Nyma, you're going to act as heavy artillery for the Guard's main assault. There's one command ship in orbit with three other battleship-class vessels in the armada. Focus your fire on those and let the Guard handle the fighters."

"We'll come in through a second wormhole after the initial assault," Shiro added. "Hopefully we can find a weak point to punch through, because we're headed straight for the ground. Matt will get to Red and get her back to the castle with Keith, Lance, Akira, and Thace on board. Allura and I will cover his retreat."

"Sounds straightforward enough," Val said. "We ready to move out, then?"

Shiro nodded. Matt was already headed for the door, his steps light with a nervous energy that Val sympathized with all too well. Commander Holt.

And Rolo, if the Delegate was telling the truth.

Val stayed back with Nyma, keenly aware of her own brand of nervous energy. "Val," Nyma said.

"I know." Val squeezed her hand. "You want to tell Shiro? If he knew--"

"If he knew, he'd tell us to go," Nyma said, the shell-shock finally falling away. She scowled and squared her shoulders. "He's too soft sometimes, you ever notice that? We're already down three lions. We can't--"

Val quieted her with a finger on her lips. "This is your call. We can help with the homeworld, or we can help Pidge. Either way, someone's going to be down. That's just a fact of life when you're up against the Empire, right? We'll get through it. We always do."

For a moment, Nyma said nothing, just stared at Val like something she'd never seen before. After a moment, her eyes softened, and she let her shoulders drop. "Homeworld first," she said, firm. "Pidge and Ryner can handle a little recon, and Rolo would give me hell if he heard I didn't even try to help Keith when he was in trouble."

"Are they that close?"

"In Rolo's head, maybe." Nyma scoffed, but she pulled Val along, hurrying to catch up with the others. "They talked for a whole twenty minutes, but for a week after that it was all _Keith_ this, _Keith_ that. I don't know if Rolo had a crush on the kid or wanted to adopt him, but either way, he wouldn't walk away from this."

Nyma wasn't the type to walk away, either, Val thought. Maybe once upon a time she had been, but not now. Not since Val had known her, honestly. But if it was easier to pin it all on Rolo, Val would let her have that.

"Okay," she said, leaning her arm against Nyma's. "Let's go do this. Then we'll see where Pidge is at."

She didn't say it, didn't promise that Rolo would be there, or that they would get him back. She hoped they would, hoped desperately they would, but she'd learned to be cynical, and she knew Nyma was a hundred times worse.

But they would try.

And maybe, just maybe, Meri's lead would prove to be exactly what they'd been needing all this time.

* * *

Lance maybe should have thought this through a little more. He had no intel on the clinic, no floorplans, no inside man, no eye in the sky. He never thought he would actually miss Arel, but _damn_ if he wouldn't have been a huge help right now.

"Okay," Lance whispered. He and Akira were pressed together in a supply closet somewhere on the second floor of the building, having crashed through the first unlocked door when they heard footsteps approaching. The footsteps had finally passed on, but Lance's heart kept trying to pound out of his chest. "I'm revising this plan. We need to be smart."

"We need to keep moving," Akira said. "Just make sure no one sees us, and sooner or later we're bound to find the leeches."

"It's the ‘later’ part I'm worried about." Lance pulled Akira back from the door and massaged his forehead. "Look, I know you're a Red, and charging in is your whole deal, but that's not gonna cut it here. The building is too big, and there are too many people who could spot us and tip off security."

Akira opened his mouth, then shut it and grunted. "Okay. Then what's the plan?"

That was what Lance was trying to figure out, in fact. They'd already had to cut the lock on a service door to get into the building without being seen--two humans being far too conspicuous, with or without the Altean armor. It was only a matter of time before alarms started ringing, but Lance didn't have a clear enough picture of what they had to do to figure out where to go from here.

"We need a directory."

"A what?"

"Directory," Lance said. "This place is like a one stop shop for the Galra one percent. It's got everything but a trauma center all in one gaudy tower. Hell, it might _have_ a trauma center. Lucky for us if it does. I'll bet they'd have loads of likurs there. Unfortunately, most of this building probably doesn't need 'em, which means we could be looking for hours without any luck."

"So let's go look at the directory."

Lance gave him an unamused look. "Dressed like this? We'd be swarmed in seconds."

A grin stole across Akira's face. "So what you're saying is you need a distraction."

"Don't tip off security," Lance said quickly.

Akira's grin grew.

"Or get yourself killed."

"What, don't you trust me?"

"Not in the slightest," Lance said. He couldn't help but match Akira's grin, and he waited twenty seconds after Akira left before heading for the employee staircase at the back of the building and heading down to the first floor, which was dominated by a massive fountain tiled in Balmera crystal that cast shimmering blue patterns on the tiled ceiling. Around that were potted plants, benches backed by waterfalls, and pools inset into the floor that were spotted with something like bright orange lily pads. He was pretty sure this floor existed just to be extra, because aside from the reception desks along one wall, the glass-walled elevator bank to one side if the fountain, and the stairwell concealed behind nondescript gray panels in the wall, nothing was even remotely functional. It was like a goddamn botanical garden in here.

Lance had, fortunately, remembered to bring a cloak along on this endeavor, and he pulled it around himself as he started across the massive room, using shrubs and waterfalls to hide him from the staff and visitors.

If he hadn't been watching for signs of Akira's distraction, he wouldn't have even noticed it. Mostly it involved a lot of whispering, a few craning necks, and a small gaggle of receptionists traipsing over to the bathrooms to poke their heads inside.

Lance wasted no time. He didn't actually go up to the directory; didn't have to, and it was much too risky anyway. All he had to do was dodge waterfalls until he had a line of sight on it, then used the zoom function on his helmet's visor to get a better picture. He scanned the list of units--everything from Reproductive Health to Urgent Care, Pain Management to Physical Therapy to something called the "Vitality Restoration Center."

Galra one percent, indeed.

There were a couple of promising units listed on the directory, but none more so than the Injury and Burn Centers on the tenth and eleventh floors. They'd probably need some quick, concentrated healing up there.

Lance backtracked the way he'd come and found Akira waiting for him at the stairwell door, an expectant look on his face.

"Tenth floor," Lance said. "Then we just have to find a supply room or something."

He eyed the stairwell--empty, for now. Lance didn't trust it to stay that way for long, and ten floors was a long way to climb with the potential for discovery looming over your shoulder at every turn. So Lance climbed up onto the railing, studying the flights of stairs spiraling up around the outer walls of this shaft. The jets in his armor were designed primarily for use in low- or zero-G, which meant, unfortunately, no rocketing ten floors vertically.

Akira seemed to have had the same idea as Lance, but he didn't bother to evaluate his options. He climbed onto the railing and leaped in a single smooth motion, firing his jets--smaller and less flashy than Lance's but no less powerful. The burst carried him to a landing two floors up, though he nearly missed the railing. He caught himself by one hand and slammed against the bars with a grunt of pain.

Cursing, Lance followed him up--more carefully--and slid over the handrail onto the stairs before turning to help steady Akira. "You okay?"

Akira blew his hair out of his eyes. "Fine. First time jetpacking up a stairwell."

Lance rolled his eyes, but Akira found his balance and continued upward, Lance following a jump behind. They pinballed from one side of the stairwell to the other, the clang of their boots against the handrails ringing loud in Lance’s ears.

Somewhere around floor eight, a door opened still farther up, and Lance froze, perched atop the hand rail in preparation for his next jump. He strained his ears, trying to gauge how far away the slam of the door closing was, and which direction the feet were coming. Low voices echoed in the stairwell, overlapping themselves so many times Lance couldn't make out what they were talking about. Akira tugged on his arm, pulling him back flush against the wall, and they waited, eyes on the highest flight of stairs visible across the way.

Lance only started breathing again when another door opened and shut, cutting off the voices. "Come on," he said. "We should hurry."

As he lined up his next jump, however, a chime sounded on the overhead, and a calm feminine voice calling out a Verket Protocol. Lance didn't know what that was, but he had a sinking feeling he knew what it meant. He jumped, clearing the railing and taking the last half flight of stairs on foot, while Akira leaped for the door directly, drawing his pistol as he landed.

"Time for a Hail Mary?" Akira asked.

Lance summoned his bayard. "If your idea of a Hail Mary is to come out shooting and hope we don't get overwhelmed, then no."

Akira wrinkled his nose, but he followed Lance out into the hall--guns at the ready but not yet firing. If they could buy themselves just a few more minutes… Just long enough to find a supply room… Lance checked the doors they passed for keypads or other security measures. They'd probably keep the expensive devices powered by raw Quintessence locked up, right?

They passed a few doors labeled with room numbers, a few more neither labelled nor locked, and one that was probably a bathroom. Then, through a small transparent panel on a door at the end of the hall, he locked eyes with a Galra in a soft lavender uniform. Lance froze, watching confusion, and then alarm, flicker across the man's face.

"Shit," Lance hissed, grabbing Akira by the arm and towing him back down the hall.

"Shit what?"

Lance let out a keening sound, debating how much he could tell Akira before he decided it was time for that Hail Mary, after all. "Nothing. Just. Stepping up the timeline." Akira stared at him, then turned and stared at the door with the clear panel. He cursed, and together they broke into a sprint.

* * *

"You cannot be serious."

Rolo leaned his head back against the wall and blew out a long breath. "I know it sounds crazy."

Rax stared at him, incredulous, then stuck his hand out. It passed into the desk they were hiding behind, going misty around the edges close to the place where flesh and metal should have met. "Are you certain I am not simply dead?"

A laugh rose in Rolo's throat, but he trapped it behind his teeth. The poor kid had been through enough today without Rolo letting on how far out of his depth he was. "Not yet we aren't. In fact, we're better off now than we were this morning. Uh--no offense. I wish you hadn't had to go through all this, believe me I do. But since we aren't getting out of here any other way, we've at least got more options now that it's not just me."

Rax pulled his hand back and wrapped it around his knees, his brow furrowing as he stared at Rolo. "You mean to fight back. As you did with Sam, when you…"

He trailed off, but there weren't exactly a lot of things he might be referring to. Rolo had given him a brief overview of what he and Sam had been doing, including trashing the first lab, but with no way to know how long the druids would be at it on the other side of the room, or when Rax might get yanked back into his body, Rolo hadn't wanted to get too deep into anything. There would be time for that later, after Rax had figured out how to step out of his body at will.

"We probably won't be doing that, exactly," Rolo said. "At this point, I'm not sure it would stop anything, and neither of us can afford to take a beating for wrecking their stuff. But we can gather information. Poke around this place, try to figure out what they're up to, where they took Sam..." Rolo paused, his heart contracting again at the thought of Sam. The Sentinel's presence had retreated, but it was impossible to ignore it while he was so far from his body. "Sam said he was able to connect with the paladins' system. He wasn't sure how clear it was to them what he was trying to say, but he might be able to pass along a message--or I could, since it's only a matter of time before they hook me up and send me out to fight. If we can tell them where we are…"

"Shay would come." Rax's voice was soft, choked with emotion, and Rolo risked a hand on his shoulder. Rax looked up at him. "If my sister knew where to find me, she would come."

"Any of them would," Rolo said. "Sam's kids are on the team, and I like to think a couple of them consider me a friend. I know they're all too good to leave anyone in a place like this. That's why we need to gather information for them. It'll probably take some time for you to get used to this, but eventually you'll be able to do it whenever you want, and to wander a good distance from the cell--or from here, when they take you for more tests. Sam's better at sifting through files than me, but I'll teach you what I can. We'll see what we can find before I--"

He cut off as Rax went rigid, his entire form suddenly fuzzing.

"Aw, vrekt. Looks like they're done for the day. It's okay. Don't fight it. I'll stick with you until they get you back to the cell. You won't be able to see me, but I'll be there."

Rax held Rolo's gaze for a long moment, searching his eyes like he was trying to gauge his sincerity. Then he nodded, and vanished without a word. Rolo willed himself back to Rax's bedside in the blink of an eye, arriving just in time to hear the hitch in Rax's breathing as he came back to himself, and to all the aches that entailed. Rolo squeezed his wrist, hating that it gave him more comfort than it gave Rax, who shrank back as sentries reached down to pull him to his feet.

"Get him settled," one of the druids said--Decora, Rolo thought her name was. She seemed to be in charge here, so she stuck out in his mind. "Then go grab the halfbreed. We need to be out of here in twenty dobashes."

Rolo's mouth ran dry, and he pressed closer to Rax as he stiffened. They were leaving? Why? Why _now_? Rolo wanted to grab Decora by the collar and shake the answers out of her, but it was a futile urge. Prisoners didn't get to ask questions, especially when they happened to be incorporeal.

But they were being relocated; that much was clear, and the urgency in Decora's voice made him uneasy. Something had changed. Something big.

And change was never good for prisoners of the Empire.

* * *

Adrenaline sang in Matt's veins as he waited out the final count in the back of Black's cockpit. He hadn't regretted letting Keith take Red to the homeworld until now, when all he wanted to do was fly full-tilt toward the thorn that kept pricking his mind with a reminder that Keith was hurt and in danger.

"Guard is away." Layeni's voice was clipped in a way that might have sounded disinterested if Matt hadn't seen the way Layeni and Akira interacted. She was far more straight-laced than him, but she cared, and cared deeply. Being so pragmatic right now _was_ her way of showing she cared.

"We're right behind you," Val said. "Let's do this."

"Copy that," Allura said. "We'll await your signal."

Shiro switched off his mic as Layeni and Val acknowledged Allura's words and turned to find Matt's eyes in the low lighting. "We'll get them," he said. "All of them."

Matt smiled, because if anyone was more worried than Matt about what was happening on the homeworld right now, it was Shiro. He and Allura had checked in on Keith and Lance twice more while organizing this attack, but it was only the latest check, when they'd all piled in here in preparation for launch, that Matt noticed the change.

"There's no way to tell how far apart they are?"

Shiro glanced at Allura as though they were conferring on how much to tell Matt. "From this far away, it's difficult," Shiro said slowly. "But judging by the pattern of Lance's thoughts, it's a considerable distance."

"Let's get to Keith first," Allura said. "Thace is still with him, and he should be able to tell us what's going on. Worst case scenario, you can take Red and get Keith back to the castle-ship while Shiro and I circle back to pick up Lance and Akira."

Matt nodded, though the whole thing made him uneasy. Why had Lance and Akira left at all? No one had been able to call them, but Matt had been on the receiving end of Shiro and Allura's pseudo-telepathy often enough to know that Lance would have gathered that someone was one the way to help. The fact that they'd left anyway reeked of an urgency Shiro and Allura hadn’t picked up on. Maybe Keith was hurt worse than they all realized. Bad enough that Lance and Akira couldn't justify waiting for a rescue they had no specifics about.

It made sense, but that didn't to anything to loosen the knot in Matt's chest.

"How long do you think we have to wait?"

A muscle jumped in Shiro's cheek, betraying his own impatience. (That was nice. At least Matt wasn't the only one who felt like he was about to split apart at the seams.) "They need time to stir up some chaos on the other side," Shiro said, fighting for a reasonable tone. "With a Voltron Lion in the mix, that shouldn't take too long, but we need to make sure there's as little focus on our arrival as possible."

Matt had heard this all a million times before, of course: they were counting on the element of surprise to give them an opening to get down to the surface without trouble. Repeating it didn't make it any easier to swallow, but what else was he expecting? It wasn't like they could just throw the plan to the wind and kick down the doors of the occupying fleet.

He just had to wait, and hope they made it to the surface in time.

* * *

Akira and Lance were surrounded.

It had started as a single security officer--uniformed, but not armored, with a small pistol at his side that he barely knew how to fire. They took him out quickly and stashed him in the closest room--thankfully empty, but there was no telling how long that would last.

The single security officer turned into a pair, and then there were actual soldiers ghosting through the hall. Still not a peep of an alarm--wouldn't want to disrupt the guests here for a frickin' spa day. Even down here, everything was posh and pretentious, with murals on the wall Akira assumed referenced triumphant moments from Zarkon's reign and soft music playing just on the edge of hearing. Even the room they'd stashed the guard in looked more like a luxury hotel suite than a hospital room. Or maybe that had been a private waiting room.

"Fuck this place," Akira muttered as a second squad of soldiers appeared from the opposite direction. He didn't know if Vit really was here with a full compliment of soldiers, or if they'd been sent in as soon as word arrived that there were humans here. Akira had to imagine he and Lance were pretty high up on Vit's most wanted list. "Don't you have grenades or something?" Akira called over his shoulder to Lance, who was picking off the flanking squad one at a time from behind a counter that provided minimal cover. Lance was making do, however, and Akira covered him from behind with his shield, trying just to hold off the advanced guard long enough for Lance to make an opening to continue their search for the leech-whatever.

Lance gave an offended squawk. "I'm not going to blow up a hospital, Akira, what the hell?"

"It's not a hospital," Akira said. "I'd feel bad if it were a hospital. This is more like... a VIP health center."

He turned to find Lance glaring at him. "No explosions," he said in a stern voice that reminded Akira way too much of Takashi. "Get ready to run, though. I'm almost finished over here, and I see a couple of keypads that might be the rooms we're looking for."

Akira flashed an OK with one hand, but the soldiers on his end were growing more daring, and he had to keep all his focus on holding them off before someone found a better line of sight and started doing some real damage.

Ten seconds later, Lance turned, adding his fire to Akira's, and hissed at him to move. Akira left the alcove beside the counter at once, firing at the soldiers’ feet as he backed away. However much he wanted a quick and dirty solution to the issue of their company, he wasn't eager to shoot patients or medical staff by mistake--even if the clientele here _did_ consist exclusively of rich assholes. They reached the door Lance had indicated, and Akira holstered his pistol to better brace his shield as Lance deactivated his bayard, screwed his eyes shut, then summoned it again as what looked like a plasma-edged machete.

Akira whistled, then cringed as a barrage of laserfire slammed against his shield, making him stumble. "Fancy," he said. "Now let's see what's behind door number one."

Lance snorted, slicing through the lock and shoving the door open. "Supplies," he said brightly. "Medical supplies, even. We'll have to do a little more digging to see if it's actually in here."

Akira glanced over his shoulder. "Barricade the door?"

Lance nodded, and Akira ducked in, helping him slide a metal shelving unit against the door. The sound of rattling glass vials grated on Akira's nerves, but they'd kind of backed themselves into a corner here. They couldn't search for what they needed while fending off soldiers, and they couldn't fight indefinitely anyway without posing a risk to the civilians in the building.

Getting out was going to be an issue, but they'd deal with that when the time came.

"Okay," Lance said, shoving a pair of carts toward the door, where Akira upended them against the barricade before calling it good. "Now… look for something that looks like an unholy mechanical cross between a Metroid and a facehugger."

Akira wrinkled his nose. "Someone needs to have a talk with Zarkon about product design."

This comment won a short-lived grin from Lance, who was already three rows deep into the storage area, pulling open drawers and cabinets and flipping through bins of gauze, tape, and more individually-wrapped packets than Akira knew what to do with. Akira joined him, his heart pounding as the muffled lasershots from the door gave way to heated voices and the rattle of metal and glass and an ear-splitting shriek as the shelving unit began to inch away from the door.

"Everything over here is locked," Akira called, testing a few more drawers along one wall. Lance abandoned his own search at once and crossed to Akira's side, his bayard appearing in his hand with a flash. It became the machete again, and Lance rammed it unceremoniously into the seam between drawer and frame, leaving Akira to pull each drawer open in quick succession as Lance moved down the line, bypassing the locks.

"Medicine," Akira reported, noting the chill coming out of the drawer. Apparently even alien medicine wasn't always shelf-stable. One entire unit was chilled, though the next was room temperature. Still medicines, mostly.

Lance had finished with his bayard and was starting the search from the opposite end of the locked drawers by the time Akira found them--half a dozen metal leeches, each in a clear-topped case, their bodies as big as Akira's splayed hand, with six spindly legs curled beneath them like a dead spider. There was a hole in the back of each device that matched up with the bulbs of Quintessence they found cradled in the next drawer down.

"We need a bag or something," Lance muttered, snatching up three of the leeches and balancing them against his chest. He cast around him for something useful, nodding his thanks when Akira upended a mostly-full package of small plastic cups. Lance had to crack open the cases to fit the likurs inside the plastic bag, and he still only managed to fit three, but it was a sturdy enough sack, and it dragged on Akira's belt when he tied it off. Another bag took five of the Quintessence bulbs, each wrapped in an unwieldy amount of gauze to keep them from cracking during what was sure to be an ugly escape.

Lance secured this bag to his own belt, then summoned his bayard and gave Akira a wild grin. "Ready to take on an entire army?"

"What, _again_?" Akira heaved a sigh. "If I have to."

Lance chuckled, and they readied themselves by the door, Akira looking to Lance for the count. He could hear someone shouting orders on the other side of the door, loud and snippy and increasingly angry with the soldiers who apparently couldn't do anything right. Unfortunately, the mass of armor visible through the gap by the door told a bleak tale, and not for the soldiers currently getting berated.

"There's no way," Akira said. "I know I was the one pushing for the Hail Mary plan here, but come on. The two of us are never going to fight our way out of this on our own. "

"No," Lance said. "You're right. Shit." He backed away from the door, his face screwed up in concentration. He turned a slow circle, scanning the room for something they could use. Akira hoped he saw more than Akira did, because all he could think to do was mess around with random alien medicines and hope they found some kind of a super serum to get them out of here.

The tremor that shook the building put a stop to his wild plans of turning into an intergalactic Captain America, and Akira ran to the door just in time to see the enemy ranks dissolve into chaos.

Behind him, Lance suddenly burst out laughing, the sound tinged with desperation and not a little relief as he pressed one hand to his helmet. "Arel?"

Akira couldn't hear the response that came, but Lance saw his confusion and tapped the side of his helmet, letting Akira in on the call.

"--always did have an issue with subtlety," a dry voice was saying. Arel sounded like he'd rather be cleaning up hairballs from inside his shoes than talking to the two of them, but Lance was grinning, and Akira's eyes darted back to the confusion of laser fire and moving bodies out in the hallway.

"What's happening?" Akira asked.

"He intercepted some calls about an attack at the hospital," Lance said, grinning. "And also apparently included a trace in our comms protocol--"

"Short range only," Arel called, indignant. "I'd have found you a lot sooner if you didn't decide to skip town in the flaming red beacon you call a ship."

Lance's grin widened. "Anyway, it looks like he decided to organize a rescue."

"I was _ordered_ to organize a rescue," Arel corrected. "Don't think I'm doing this for you-- _any_ of you."

This last bit was pointed, and Lance's grin faltered. "Arel… Keith's not with us."

"What? You idiots decided to split up? _Now?_ "

"No, he's-- He got hurt. Didn’t your cameras catch that part? He… There was an explosion. That's why we're here. We needed the likurs."

Utter silence followed this declaration, and then Arel swore. "I was hoping he was just being melodramatic. Just--hold on. Our people are working on an exit strategy. I'll stay on the line with you, but you should be okay to stay where you are." He paused. "You _are_ behind cover, aren't you?"

Lance tilted his head toward the barricade, which hadn't been structurally sound to begin with and now looked one or two good shoves away from collapse. "Eh, more or less."

Akira backed away from the door and drew his pistol--just in case. It was hard to make sense of the battle raging outside the supply room, but it didn't sound like it was going well for the Imperials. A few minutes later, something crashed into the barricade, making it lurch a full six inches backward into the room and waver precariously. Someone groaned, and then an unnatural silence fell.

"You still alive in there?" Arel asked. He waited for Lance's answer--more cursing than anything else--before poking his head in. He eyed them both, and the sacks at their waists, then jerked his head back toward the hallway. "Come on. We shouldn't count on this opening lasting."

Akira didn't argue. He let Lance squeeze through the ruined barricade first, then followed behind, pausing only momentarily at the sight of a swarm of sentries fighting uniformed Galra soldiers. Vit himself stood at the back of the group, fuming and shouting orders. One entire side of his head was scarred, a fine fuzz of fur not hiding the new tear in his small ear. It didn't look fresh, and Akira wondered if Vit had come here for some patching up, after all.

Arel grinned, even as he hastened them onward. "I may have drawn some inspiration from the stories Maka and the other kids had to tell about your crew."

"I won't tell if you don't," Lance said.

Amusement played across Arel's face for only a moment before he refocused on the mission at hand. A handful of Galra in medical uniforms split off from the ranks cowering at the far end of the unit, joining Arel, Lance, and Akira in racing for the stairs. They didn't head back down toward the ground floor, but rather up, using cable guns to whisk them all to the top floor and the roof access beyond. A ship was waiting here, small and nondescript, with an unfamiliar logo hastily painted on the side. The paint had smeared toward the tail like it hadn't had a chance to dry before the ship took flight.

"In!" Arel roared, shoving Lance ahead of him toward the ship.

Arel left them in the cargo space, heading up to the cockpit, and Akira collapsed beside Lance, his heart singing with adrenaline. "That was fun," he said.

Lance glowered at him and untied the bag full of Quintessence bulbs from his belt, checking each in turn to ensure it hadn't cracked.

Arel returned shortly after they took off, pushing back the hood of his cloak and eyeing them both. "Okay, start from the beginning. Vorsek's gone and got himself hurt, has he? How bad?"

"His name is Keith," Lance said, not cold so much as curt. He glared Arel down until Arel averted his eyes and took a seat in one of a dozen chairs lining the walls of this space. Once he'd done so, Lance stood and claimed a seat opposite Arel. "And… bad. He’s not dying, but he’s not in good shape. He kind of got blown up, remember?" He patted the bag in his lap, which shone faintly with the gauze-wrapped Quintessence bulbs within. "You can have the rest for the resistance. I have a feeling you're going to need it."

Arel's eyes lingered on the light, then flicked to the bag Akira had just transferred to his own lap as he sat up, not bothering to get up off the floor. Arel blinked twice, then turned back to Lance. "We're going to need you, more."

"Me?"

Arel nodded. "You and Vor-- You and Keith." He paused, sighed. "Things have been moving fast since this morning. Vit's troops are everywhere, and they've already started to get violent. People are getting hurt--but they're fighting back, too. They're fighting back because of you. Because Voltron's on their side."

Lance tugged off his helmet and ran his fingers through sweaty hair. "I mean… that was kind of the point, wasn't it?"

Arel spread his hands. "Let's just get back to wherever it is you've been hiding, and we'll take it from there."

* * *

Things started off smoothly.

Nyma had already shut away as many distractions as she could. Thoughts of Rolo, of Sam Holt, of Pidge and Ryner, of Meri--these had all been relegated to a dark corner of her mind where she wouldn't have to deal with them. Blue tried prodding at first, and Val's mind was a hovering cloud of concern, but Nyma bullied them both into focusing on the task at hand.

An armada.

Not the largest they'd faced, not by a long shot. But it was nothing to sniff at, either, especially with no other lions in play. Val was providing weapons support and monitoring the scanners while Nyma flew and manned the main cannon. They punched through two of the artillery ships before anyone had a chance to react, then headed straight on toward the command ship in low orbit over the planet. An attack there would draw everyone else in to defend the bigwigs.

And it did. The fighters scattered across the area turned toward the path of destruction Nyma had cut through their midst and converged like a swarm of crimson skalgart defending their nest. They threw themselves at the Blue Lion, absorbing her lasers in a pitiful attempt to spare the remaining assault ships and the command ship, which had already begun a frantic retreat.

The Guard poured through the wormhole behind Blue, picking off the distracted Imperial fighters one by one. Blue's precision slice widened into a trough, into a wedge in the heart of the armada with the wormhole at their rear. The Imperial forces swarmed them, giving back as good as they got, and if a frontal assault were all the more they had planned, they would have been doomed. Nyma couldn't make any headway with so many fighters swooping around her. Here and there a lucky shot took out a gunner, but anything bigger than that remained at a safe distance, weapons powering up in anticipation of a counterattack.

Nyma held her breath, peering through Val's eyes at the scanners and counting the seconds until enough of the fleet was concentrated around the main force. The rearguard was already weakened, the Imperials too worried about Blue to watch for backup from another angle. They'd gotten used to the Lions spreading out their firepower the last few months. Before that, they would have been looking for the other lions, but the war was ongoing on too many fronts for the paladins to provide each other backup often. As far as the Imperials here knew, Blue and the Guard were all the more Voltron was willing to commit.

Val and Nyma saw the opening at the same moment. The last of the fighters around their entry point broke away to replace the ones Blue had already reduced to scrap metal. There were still satellites, which would alert the command ship as soon as Black came through, but without anyone nearby to respond, they would have ten or fifteen seconds to slip through. In the Black Lion, ten seconds was all they needed.

"Shiro!" Nyma barked. "Now's your chance."

The wormhole blossomed at once, brilliant light singing Nyma's eyes as she pulled Blue into a loop to dislodge a cluster of fighters trying to wreck themselves on her cannons.

She took her eyes off the Black Lion's wormhole for only an instant, but an instant was all the longer it too for everything to go off the rails. There was another flash of light, this one burning red for the briefest of instants before it snuffed out. On the comms, she heard only shouting.

She wheeled around, searching out the Black Lion just in time to watch another explosion rock it. Blue roared in sympathetic pain, Shiro cursed, and Allura cried Matt's name.

A third explosion ripped a hole in Black's side, and Nyma finally put the pieces together. The satellites. The satellites had been rigged to blow. But why had they only detonated on the Black Lion?

There wasn't time to wonder. While Nyma had been busy gaping at the Black Lion, the Imperial forces had converged on the Guard. The air around Blue was suddenly clear, leaving her a straight shot at the command ship. Nyma almost took it, too, except for the flare of panic from Val that yanked her attention back toward the Guard. Where before Layeni's pilots had been holding their own, suddenly they found themselves surrounded, their ranks methodically shredded by quick strikes to key points int he formation.

Nyma swore, obeying Val's silent plea and heading for the core of the Guard ships. The command ship opened fire on their rear, but Blue's shields were better than that.

"Fall back!" Nyma roared, descending on the enemy ships with a vengeance.

"Not yet," Layeni growled. "We can hold out a little longer."

Nyma headbutted a gunner going for Layeni's squad. "Fall. Back. I need to get over to the Black Lion before they blow her out of the sky, and I can't do that if I have to cover your ass."

"The mission--"

"Is beyond over." Nyma reached for the comms, but Val was faster, opening the line to Coran and asking for a wormhole behind the Guard. It blossomed before Layeni was done waffling over her decision. "We'll be back," Nyma said, frustration clipping her words. "We need to preserve as much of our force as we can for when that time comes."

Layeni finally relented, barking orders at the Guard until they began to fall back, vanishing back through the wormhole. A few Imperial fighters followed them, but Nyma spared them less than no thought. If the Guard could handle them, the castle could, and Nyma was more worried about Shiro, Allura, and Matt. She'd felt nothing from them in the bond since the first explosion, and heard nothing coherent over the comms. Curses from Shiro, muffled shouts from Allura, who'd either been thrown from her station or had gone to help Matt.

"The bombs," Val warned as they approached.

Nyma glared at the gash in the Black Lion's side and curled her lip. "Fuck the bombs."

Blue roared in agreement, and the cannon mounted on her back, above Nyma's usual post in the turret, shifted--a strange sensation when Nyma felt Blue like an extension of her own body. There was no time for discomfort, though, and Nyma took up the controls and fired before she had a chance to think better of it.

She saw no visible effect through the viewscreen, but lights on several of Val's displays winked out in a wave as satellites lost power. Lost the proximity alarms or timers that made them landmines, hopefully.

She charged in, bracing for the worst, but Blue's improvisation seemed to have done the trick. Satellites bounced off Blue's shield or fragmented. Some detonated, but the isolated explosions were nothing like the ones that hit the Black Lion, just little flares that burned out in an instant.

The Black Lion was drifting by the time Nyma arrived, but the Imperial fleet had given up on the Guard forces now that they'd retreated. They had an entire armada zeroing in on their location, and no time to be delicate about the extraction. Nyma positioned Blue below the Black Lion, directly opposite the wormhole that had just opened above them. She tucked her head and shoved, driving Black through the wormhole and following close behind.

The wormhole closed as soon as they were through, shaving off the tip of an assault ship, which still glowed red with a building laser pulse.

"Shiro!" Val called, her voice breaking through Nyma's narrow focus. "Are you okay?"

"We'll live," Shiro said, his voice taut. "Thanks for the save."

Nyma hummed, turning her eyes toward the thin stream of Guard ships headed back toward the castle. "Don't mention it. I think we've got bigger problems, anyway."

"I think you're right."

The shock was already fading as she set down in the main hangar, Val calling for medical support as they entered. Nyma reached the bottom of Blue's ramp just as Shiro emerged from Black, supporting Matt. Shiro looked shaken but unharmed, but Matt was limping, and Allura, close behind them, had a line of blood oozing from her brow line. Both Shiro and Allura looked livid, and Nyma's usual instincts would have pulled her far, far away from them, as they left Matt in the care of Val and a medic and headed for the door.

Today she followed, her own horror giving way to rage.

"They knew."

It was Layeni who spoke the words, her composure fracturing as she met the three paladins at the door.

Shiro stopped, his face uncannily blank. "What?"

"They knew," Layeni hissed, steering him to a quiet corner, away from the tangle of damaged ships and frantic pilots trying to get a count of the dead and missing.

Five minutes. Not even. How many people had died in that short time?

It reminded Nyma of her old crew. Of Talla and Eryx and an explosion that came too quick for goodbyes.

"They shouldn't have known we were coming," Layeni went on, her voice hoarse. "They couldn't have."

"But they did," Allura said. She looked at Shiro, who looked back at her, and Nyma knew they were both thinking the same thing.

Layeni straightened her shoulders. "Someone sold us out."

"It seems that way, yes," Shiro said.

Layeni nodded. "I'm going to find out who it was, and I'm going to make sure they pay for every life we lost out there."

Allura grabbed her arm before she could storm off, and the two retreated a short distance away, whispering together in heated tones. Shiro lingered where he was, his jaw set, his eyes hard as luxite.

"How many people knew about the plan?" Nyma asked, sidling up beside him.

Shiro didn't turn toward her, but she felt his attention shift.

She let the silence linger, her eyes never leaving Layeni's back.

It was a convincing performance, that raw grief and fury. Nyma found it hard to disbelieve it. But they'd used the secure room for a reason. They hadn't discussed the plan with the rest of the Guard.

They'd been careful.

And Nyma just didn't trust Layeni enough to give her a free pass because she knew how to look distraught.

She turned then, catching Shiro's gaze and holding it. "This ends now," she said. "We can't take any more chances."

Shiro closed his eyes, but he was a pragmatist to the core. However soft he was in his best moments, however noble, he’d been changed by his time in the Arena. He knew better than anyone else here that sometimes you had to come down hard. Sometimes you had to make the hard call in order to survive. Nyma had seen that in him from the start, and she wasn't at all surprised when he nodded.

"We'll see what we turn up," he murmured. "We have to be sure. But I promise, I'm not going to let this slide."


	40. Suspicions Rising

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Meri got her hands on some files that list the Jessaranti Asteroid Belt as the headquarters of Vindication, so Pidge and Ryner have gone to scope it out in Green. Hunk and Shay, after discovering what seems to be the aftermath of a Vkullor attack, are searching for any information on the Empire's latest weapon. Lance and Akira, on the homeworld, successfully stole a medical device called a likur and reconnected with the local resistance, but they're still trapped as the result of a narrowly-averted disaster during the rescue attempt. The issue of the spy has risen once more to the forefront of the paladins' minds, and they need to figure out who has betrayed them before it gets someone killed.

Pidge's hands were steady on the controls of the Green Lion.

The Jessaranti Asteroid Belt loomed just ahead, a smattering of broken rocks hardly distinguishable from the backdrop of stars at this distance, but it pulled at them with an agonizing blend of hope and fear.

Vindication.

Their father.

They couldn't know for sure what they would find--didn't dare hope that whatever was here was still the active base of operations--but it still felt as close to an answer as they'd had in more than two years of desperate searching, first on Earth and then all across the Empire.

_He's here._

Ryner's mind stirred at the unspoken thought, but she held her opinion close. Pidge wasn't sure if it was skepticism she was hiding, or hope, but either way they couldn't help the surge of spiteful optimism it awakened in them. He was here. He had to be.

"Cloaking activated," Ryner said, her tone level but her mind lending it a sharp prick, like she felt she had to remind them that this was a reconnaissance mission only. As if Pidge had forgotten. As if they weren't already wrung out with the knowledge that they weren't going to see their dad yet, even if he _was_ here.

It was too risky. Until they had a better picture of the defenses here, they couldn't risk an extraction. If they did, they'd just as likely get Pidge's dad killed as get him out.

Pidge didn't say any of that, though, just tightened their grip on the controls and leaned forward, their heart trying to race ahead of them to the small, bright spots in the distance.

 _I'm coming, Dad,_ they promised to the night sky. _We're going to get you home._

* * *

The castle-ship was falling apart.

Shiro tried to put on a brave face, tried not to let on how hard it was to meet with Guardsmen, with Layeni, all the while with a voice in the back of his head asking whether or not he could really trust them.

Shiro had counted and re-counted the number of people who could have betrayed them, and it was a distressingly short list: himself, Allura, Val and Nyma, Matt, and Layeni--the six of them locked inside the secure conference room as they discussed the plan. Coran, who had been too busy conferring with Hunk and Shay about the devastation they had found along the route of the old Balmera Migrations to attend the meeting, but had been told about the first part of the plan just before launch so he could open a wormhole for the Guard.

Even he hadn't known about the part Shiro, Allura, and Matt were to play, though. Allura had opened their wormhole herself, and they'd agreed to tell as few people as possible.

Coran and the paladins hardly even counted as suspects. That seemed to rankle Layeni, but Shiro knew his team better than he knew himself. He'd been inside the other paladins heads on multiple occasions, and Coran had been their first ally, and the most true. He'd lost everything to this war--everything except Allura and the new family they'd built--and he continued to sacrifice more every day.

But that left only Layeni, and anyone she might have told about the plan. She insisted she'd done no such thing, of course. Even though it cast her in a worse light, she stood by her statement. She'd told no one that the Black Lion would be coming in along a different vector. She'd told her officers about the Guard's role in the battle, but only those details they needed to know and only after her conference with the paladins--a scant eighteen minutes before launch. Possibly that was enough time to set up the ambush, but it was an incredibly close margin.

They'd gathered the names of the officers she'd spoken with anyway, just to explore every avenue, and Layeni--clearly struggling to maintain a civil tone--had requested permission to conduct her own investigation.

Well, she hadn't requested permission so much as informed Shiro that she would be investigating and would be in touch with her conclusions.

Shiro worried that a misstep in her investigation--or a deliberate tip of her hand--would disrupt the balance in the Guard, but he didn't technically have the authority to override Layeni's decisions where the Guard was concerned. Coran did, but he'd opted to merely observe her investigation for the time being.

"We don't know that the Lieutenant Commander is guilty," Coran said. He and Karen had joined Shiro and Allura in the conference room to discuss the issue and review security footage of their new suspects--Layeni and her three top officers, Relix, Trusalo, and Lojiri. Akira, Keith, Lance, and Thace were still stranded on the homeworld--now more than ever, the fleet having been augmented by additional forces. Shiro was starting to think he was going to have to call all three of the other lions back to punch through--something he was reluctant to do with Pidge chasing news of Sam and the Yellows searching frantically for evidence to counter Coran's theory regarding the destruction of the Balmera.

Even Val and Nyma had been in and out the last two days on other missions while Shiro and Allura were dealing with the spy situation. They were still at war, after all, and Zarkon wasn't letting up on any front. The paladins couldn't afford to sit and wait, however much they all wanted to get to Keith and the others.

Shiro and Allura had confirmed that Keith was holding on. Akira and Lance had retrieved a medical device neither Shiro nor Allura recognized, but which had dampened Lance's worry enough to put Shiro's mind at ease, at least for a couple of days.

Not as much as he'd thought, apparently, if Coran was tiptoeing around the issue like this.

"I know we don't have proof," Shiro said, running his fingers through his hair as he scanned once more through the footage from two days ago. "And I know that you and Akira both trust Layeni. Ordinarily, that would be enough for me. I'm still willing to believe that she didn't knowingly betray us. She may very well have let something slip by mistake. But the leak had to have come through her. There's no other answer."

"She could have been been bugged," Karen said.

Allura shook her head. "This room scans for tech automatically."

"I don't mean tech." Karen set down the tablet she'd been working on--constructing a timeline of suspected security breaches so the others could narrow their focus. The hope was they'd find a pattern with Layeni or one of her officers--some indication that they weren't being entirely upright in their intentions. They'd found nothing from the day of the ambush, so they had no choice but to look further back.

Now that she had the others' attention, Karen seemed to falter.

"I should have thought of it sooner," she said. "In hindsight, it seems obvious that it's a potential hole in our security, but I never considered it before. Olkari tech." She looked to Coran. "Ryner had mentioned something she was working on. A way to keep tabs on Keena. Functionally, it's no different than any other bug, but Ryner seemed certain Keena would never notice it."

Coran stroked his mustache. "I… suppose it's possible, in theory, for Olkari tech to slip by the scanners we have installed at the door. Most of what they make--most of what's advanced enough to pose a security risk--has enough tech in it to be detected, but…"

"But they also work with plants," Allura said. "Organic machines."

Shiro dropped his head into his hands, batting down a swell of despair. "So we're back to square one?"

"Not entirely," Karen said. "Even if I'm right, the spy would still have to be Olkari or have some connection to them."

That was true, but not as helpful as it sounded. They already knew that the spy had been in place on the castle-ship by the time they'd liberated Olkarion, and at that point anyone could have theoretically made contact with an engineer from the surface. Shiro supposed they could cross-reference the officers list--and the suspect list Akira had provided a few weeks ago--with the records of who had been down to Olkarion after the battle. They could look for any packages that had originated from Olkarion, too.

But how much good would that do them?

Honestly, it was starting to look like they'd never have their answers--at least, not before the hunt ruined the trust that had slowly been building among the Guardsmen. Once they started looking for signs of betrayal among their fellow pilots, it would be too easy to get swept up in the furor.

But they had to try. The paladins couldn't win this war on their own. Shiro wasn't even sure they'd be able to get through the fleet around the homeworld on their own, not with the Red Lion--and therefore Voltron--off the table.

"Let's focus on the suspects we have right now," Shiro said, sitting up straighter. "Clear them or find proof of their guilt. Then we can worry about looking into who else might have commissioned a hypothetical undetectable bug from the Olkari."

No one argued, and Shiro shut down his frustrations as he dove back into the records.

The answer was in here somewhere; he just had to find it.

* * *

Lance lay atop the Red Lion's head, peering through his scope at the confrontations happening on the streets below. Mirek had mobilized what remained of her troops to strike back at the IP wherever they appeared in force--at demonstrations, in parks and shopping centers and other public spaces, at suspected resistance strongholds. Thace and Akira were out among the troops, and Lance was providing support for Akira's team from a distance.

What really put them over the top, though, was the support from the general populace. The resistance was hurting for bodies; for fighters even more so. Civilians weren't soldiers, by any means, but--spurred on by the sight of a ragtag militia driving back the IP, and by the Red Lion, who towered over the industrial sector--people were joining the fray. Some brought clubs or bats or other improvised weapons. A few had pistols or swords.

They weren't trained, but sheer numbers and sheer passion were giving the IP pause.

Lance's heart was in his throat through all of it. He turned his scope from target to target, taking out sentries and soldiers before they could shoot civilians. This was exactly what they'd been hoping for--to galvanize the 301, to draw more support to their fight. He'd known that, but he wasn't ready to see it happening.

These were civilians. They shouldn't have to risk their lives like this. But if they didn't, then Vit would crush them all beneath the weight of the Imperial army.

Akira pushed harder than any of Mirek's soliders, drawing fire to himself and returning twice as good as he got. Together with the other resistance members, he was at least mitigating the casualties, though it was impossible to save everyone.

"Reinforcements on their way." The voice in his ear was soft and carefully controlled, a stark difference from either Arel or Mirek, the two voices Lance was most used to hearing orders from. But Mirek was out in the field herself, today. She and Thace were leading the fight on the second front, halfway across the city. One of the other regional coordinators was in charge of the operation today, watching from a base Lance didn't have the clearance to know about.

She passed along grid coordinates that corresponded to an intersection half a mile away, and Lance lowered his rifle, counting on the zoom function built into his paladin helmet to enhance his view of the distant figures--Vit's troops this time. The IP was already stretched thin, and several days of constant skirmishes had made more than a few of them wary about future engagements. Lance wouldn't go so far as to say they'd had a change of heart, but they'd never trained as soldiers. As offworlders, they held no loyalty to the people of the 301, but they also didn't have the discipline to march into an all-out battle.

"I'll go head them off," Lance said, dismissing his bayard and scrambling to his feet. "Akira, you're on your own for a bit."

"Copy that. Try not to have too much fun without me."

Lance's lips twitched, an automatic response to Akira's dry humor. It had become something of a tradition between them, through two days of almost nonstop action. Neither found much actual humor in these battles, but Akira kept cracking increasingly feeble jokes, and Lance kept smiling.

It kept them sane.

Lance sprinted to the tip of Red's nose and leaped, firing his jets in midair. There was no one on the street below to see him--the fighting was too close for anyone to risk a trip to the store--but imagined eyes traced his path from behind tinted windows. However much the city might seem abandoned, Lance could never convince himself it was true. People lived here, worked here. Some might have cleared out when the demonstration began, but more would have stayed. When nowhere in the city was safe, sometimes all you could do was lie low and wait for things to pass.

Lance landed on the flat rooftop of a nearby warehouse and continued on without missing a beat, his inactive bayard a comforting weight in his hand. He wracked his brain, trying to remember what was in the area. There weren't many residences around here, which was good. They'd known there was likely to be collateral damage in the fighting, so they'd tried to focus on the industrial and government districts--easy enough, since that was where most of the demonstrations happened anyway.

But that didn't mean he could be careless. He'd already done enough harm with his grenades for one week.

Leaping several more alleys, Lance spotted a place where the road narrowed. The far building was a massive factory--mostly automated, if he wasn't mistaken, and its shadow encroached on the street the soldiers were approaching along. It was the best Lance could hope for: contained enough that the troops couldn't avoid his attacks, bounded on at least one side by a building that wasn't likely to contain any innocent bystanders.

Lance dropped low beside the lip that ran along the perimeter of the rooftop and activated his bayard. He'd used his grenade launcher a few times since the battle at the Kral Mestna, but his hands still shook as he rested the barrel on the lip and took aim at the street below. He could just see the first of the reinforcements approaching down the way--four troop transports on the ground and one ship in the air.

Cursing under his breath, Lance changed tactics. There wasn't a lot on the ground to offer cover, but he took what he could get, firing a gooey grenade behind a trash can and attaching several more to the back side of sign posts and street lights. He'd discovered a new function during yesterday's battle: the ability to link multiple grenades to a single detonator switch, rather than firing them with a self-contained delay. He risked three more charges spaced along the center of the street--their glow was softer when they were linked this way, and there was enough neon in the twilight that a little extra light might go unnoticed.

More importantly, Lance relocated to the shadow of the rooftop access structure, where he wouldn't immediately be spotted by the pilots of the ship overhead. It seemed to be keeping pace with the ground forces, which was good. As soon as Lance made a move on one of them, the other was going to be on the lookout for another attack. Lance needed to hit them at the same time, and he needed the ship to be close if he was going to stand any chance of landing a grenade on its hull.

He waited, counting his breaths, hating the tremor in his hands, until the hum of the ship's engines drew close enough that he could feel it in his teeth. He checked the settings on his bayard--maximum range and maximum charge; he was going to need all the firepower he could get his hands on to take that ship down before it spotted him.

Ten seconds later, it passed by his position--which meant, hopefully, the shuttles were right on top of the grenades at street level. With a deep breath, Lance swung out from cover, took aim at the ship, and fired twice. Both grenades found their mark, sticking to the hull with wet _thwumps_.

Lance flipped the detonator switch even as he dove behind the roof access--the only cover he had up here. The explosions whited the world out for a moment, the concussive force squeezing his chest even through the structure at his back. His helmet muted some of the roar of the explosions, but it still left his ears ringing as he stepped out, bayard at the ready.

The ship twisted slowly as it sunk beneath the lip of the roof, smoke pouring from a large hole in the side. Lance followed, wary, and scanned the scene below. Two of the transports had been consumed in the explosions, a third scorched and push backwards, but still intact. The fourth shuttle reversed direction and took off for a safer route as soldiers poured out of the mostly-intact shuttle, scattering as the smoking wreckage of the ship fell atop them.

"One transport incoming," Lance called to Akira. "I'm cleaning up the rest of the force over here, and then I'll be back to help."

"Awesome. Things were starting to get predictable over here, anyway." Akira was breathing hard, his voice strained, but he was already shouting a warning to the rest of his team as he muted his mic, and Lance refocused his attention on his own battle. The sooner he finished up here, the better.

* * *

Nyma perched on the corner of a table in an empty room, her legs crossed at the knees, one foot kicking at the air. She drummed her fingers on the table and counted the off-colored tiles on the far wall.

She wasn't sure what purpose this room served; it was near the top of Green Tower, and though the cleaning systems were back online by now, Nyma saw no evidence that this part of the castle was in use. The Guard had claimed Blue Tower, the refugees Yellow, but more than half of the other two towers still stood empty. Nyma had passed a number of labs and greenhouses on her way out here, even a few things she could identify as archives rooms.

This one, though? Looked like a dining room or some shit. There was probably more to it than that, but Nyma couldn't begin to guess what.

She'd been here for about five minutes, and already she wanted to pick up her comm and ask Val how it was coming. That would kind of defeat the purpose of this experiment, though. (Or so Val said. Nyma seriously doubted that talking over the comms network would give Val any significant advantage locating her--but then, what did Nyma know? She wasn't the one who'd spent half a year studying Quintessence.)

With a sigh, Nyma flopped backwards onto the table, pulling one leg up so the heel rested on the very edge of the tabletop. Val had wanted to run some experiments today. As long as Shiro and Allura were still trying to work things out with the Guard and the Yellows were off hunting a Vkullor, they ought to at least try to be productive with their time in between missions. Pidge was optimistic about the lead Meri had provided them--but they'd been gone for two days already, with only a brief message back to the castle each night saying they were still searching.

Nyma wasn't worried yet, though Matt and Val both were. Meri had only provided a name--the Jessaranti Asteroid Belt. As Nyma understood it, Jessaranti had turned out to cover a massive swath of space, and searching it was proving to be a slow process. Pidge and Ryner couldn't be sure that anything would show up on their scanners (in fact, nothing _had_ showed up on a preliminary loop of the belt), and they didn't want to risk detection, which meant they were running the cloak on minimal power--not enough to hide themselves completely, but enough that only short-range sensors should be able to detect them. It gave them a few hours of stealth at a stretch, but they kept having to fall back to an abandoned asteroid to recharge.

 _I hope they find something,_ Val had said when she proposed this training to Nyma. _I really hope they do, but whatever's out there might have been abandoned a long time ago._

And Val's bilocation was the only other lead they had--doubly so now that they knew it was possible across vast distances. That was why Nyma was here, camped out in a random-ass room that was just a hair too cold to be comfortable. She'd at least been allowed to stay in the rec room until twenty minutes ago, as Val had to figure out exactly how far her range was. Inside Blue, with the lion's Quintessence to boost her own but otherwise relying entirely on the techniques she'd learned in her training, Val could reach the castle from the surface of the planet they were orbiting, but that was about it.

So she'd ordered Nyma to find somewhere remote to hang out for an hour or two--not the rec room because, as much as possible, Val didn't want to be looking for a familiar location, and not somewhere else in the heart of the castle because she didn't want to somehow accidentally latch onto the combined pull of multiple familiar individuals.

It was all way above Nyma's pay grade, but helping Val meant she didn't have to help Shiro and Allura--not that she wouldn't have gladly hunted down the spy and given them what was coming, but everyone wanted to be subtle about it.

Subtlety was not in Nyma's arsenal at the moment.

So here she was. Bored out of her mind. Val had had no luck routing herself through the Heart to get back to the homeworld, but she insisted it would be easier from a planet away, rather than several galaxies. And if she could do it at this range, she might be able to figure out the key to even larger distances.

They were falling ass-backward into this technique, but considering how sparse Meri's information had been, Nyma still counted this as her best bet for seeing Rolo again.

She should have brought some nail polish or something to distract her while she waited to hear from Val. There was nothing else to do up here, and her experiences on the homeworld told her that she wouldn't have the slightest clue that Val was here if and when it happened.

Would it screw Val up if Nyma decided to take a nap?

Before she could decide whether or not to go for it, her comms unit chirped. Nyma cracked one eye open, then pressed the button to answer the call. "Yeah?"

Val didn't wait for her finish saying the word. "It worked! I couldn't reach you normally, but then I went back to the lighthouse, and it took me straight to you!"

Nyma sat up, her heart in her throat. "Really? So, what, it's a distance thing? And we made it to the homeworld the other day because of... adrenaline, or something?"

"Maybe. I did a few quick tests while I was in there. Still couldn't get to Lance--or Meri, by the way. But I found Coran almost right away. Couldn't find Tev."

"Who?"

"Tev?" Val hummed. "The gangly Galra who works on the bridge sometimes? I don't know him that well, but he wasn't with Coran, so it was an easy test. I guess there's still some familiarity factor in play here, though hell if I know how that works."

Nyma dropped her feet to the floor, restlessness pooling in her core. "Okay, so… what's next?"

Val was quiet for a long moment, then made some kind of banging sound, like she'd slapped her hand down on Blue's console. "Would you mind checking to see if Coran's busy? I'm going to try a few things."

That felt like less than half of an explanation, but the distraction in Val's voice said she was thinking about something, and Nyma didn't want to disrupt her concentration. Cutting the call, she headed for the door. If Coran was the key to figuring this out, then Nyma would get him to Val, even if she had to drag him kicking and screaming off the bridge.

* * *

There was nothing.

Shiro had been digging through old security recordings with Allura for hours, using Karen's timeline to narrow in on vulnerable windows. Almost every suspected leak was limited in scope--where and when the paladins or Guard would strike, sometimes a few details on their target that shouldn't have been immediately obvious to the enemy. They could still be caught off guard by a last-minute change in plans or improvisation.

All together, it suggested that the problem was specific, discrete leaks--not an open channel that let the Empire know everything that happened on the castle-ship, and not a low-level plant who could only pass along general observations about Guard structure and formations.

It also meant that each leak had a very narrow window in which the information was vulnerable. There had been so many distress calls over the last year that they never sat on one for more than a week, and often much less than that. Except for the paladins, Akira, Coran, and his techs, no one even heard about distress calls until they'd finished their previous mission--but the techs never heard battle plans, even if one of them had wanted to leak information to the Empire.

Coran had returned to the bridge hours ago, but he'd left Karen to review all outgoing transmission from the castle-ship during the vulnerable windows while Shiro and Allura had reviewed the footage. Here and there, maybe, they could find an opportunity for Layeni or one of her officers to have relayed information from an outside comm, but the officers rarely went planetside except during missions. Layeni didn't seem to have placed any personal calls at all, from Karen's report. Plenty of communication with other members of the Guard, but no calls to an outside number and no indication--in the comms records or on camera--that she'd ever used any other lines.

"So where does this leave us?" Shiro asked, spinning his chair around to face Karen, who had stopped reviewing the content of the officers' transmissions and instead was looking for patterns in timing or recipients. She thought there might be a code they couldn't see, but so far had had no luck finding it.

Allura swept a few stray curls from her face and sighed. "I'm not sure. It would be hasty to entirely clear them so soon, but…"

"But continuing to focus all our efforts here isn't a good idea either," Karen said.

That didn't answer the question of where to look next. Before Shiro could say so, however, the saferoom door chimed to indicate a new arrival. Shiro glanced at the clock, wincing when he realized how long it had been. That would probably be Coran, come back to nudge them all toward dinner.

Instead, it was Matt who entered the room, frazzled and not a little jittery. "You guys need to get down to the Guard hangar," he said without preamble.

Shiro was on his feet in an instant. "What happened?"

Blowing out a long breath, Matt ran his finger through his hair. From the looks of it, this wasn't the first time he'd done so. "I don't know, exactly. I just went down to see if anyone had heard something from Akira, and the whole tower felt like it's waiting for a battle to break out. Someone said something about the spy. I didn't think we were going public with that yet."

"We aren't," Shiro said, already headed for the door.

He tried to stop himself from jumping to conclusions. After the disaster over the homeworld--so close on the heels of the disaster at the Zhek Chain--it wouldn't be surprising for someone to have guessed there was a spy. But he couldn't help the voice that said someone had leaked this on purpose to sow chaos among the Guard.

They left Karen behind to start looking into a potential Olkari connection. Shiro wasn't convinced that was the key, but it was a better lead than anything else they had, and any kind of forward progress, even just to rule out possibilities, was a good thing--now more than ever. If the Guard was tearing itself apart, they needed to answer the question of who the spy was as soon as possible.

Blue Tower was, if anything, even more tense than Shiro had been expecting. From the moment they stepped off the connecting bridge, a hush hung in the air, expectant and poised to break at the slightest provocation. They passed Guardsmen in their quarters, common areas, and training rooms, and every last one of them eyed the passing paladins with distrust. Shiro spotted Lealle pleading with one such group, and her face, when she noticed the paladins there, was pained.

"This is bad," Allura murmured. "Suspicion on its own can hurt their work, but if this turns to open hostility?"

"I know," Shiro said. "Do we know where Layeni is?"

"Probably down in HQ," Matt said. "Someone told me she was conducting interviews. I don't know if that was supposed to be common knowledge or not, but everyone knows about it by now."

Shiro cursed and picked up the pace. He and Allura traded looks as they waited for the elevator to carry them down to the third floor, and he knew she was weighing the same things as him. Did they treat Layeni as an enemy, demand explanations for why she had let the suspicion spread so far? Or did they assume the best and work with her? They had no evidence that she was anything but loyal, and yet…

"We need to work with her," Allura said, breaking the heavy silence. Shiro and Matt both glanced at her, and she stared back, her face the expressionless mask Shiro had come to associate with politics. "If she's an ally, we cannot afford to alienate her."

"And if she's the spy?" Matt asked.

Shiro had already caught the direction of Allura's thoughts. "Then it's even more important to keep her close. We'll do what we can to clean up this mess, we'll watch her for signs that she's making things worse. Once we have more information, we'll decide what to do about it. Until then… We're on damage control."

* * *

Keith was awake when Lance and the others returned to base.

Lance's heart tripped at the sight of him, still dressed in the baggy, grayish pajamas Mirek had provided, standing in the doorway to the back room that served as Keith and Lance's quarters. He wavered on his feet, the claws of one hand digging little ruts into the door frame, and the amber glow of his eyes didn't seem as bright as it usually was.

But he was awake, and upright, and the relief that burst across his face when he spotted Lance across the room released a swarm of butterflies in Lance's stomach.

"Lance." Keith's voice was too quiet to hear over the hum of activity around them, but there was no mistaking what he'd said, not with the way he lurched away from the door on unsteady feet.

Akira was at his side in an instant, catching him with an arm around his shoulders before he pitched forward. Keith blinked up at him, his lips parted and his brow furrowed but no question making its way past whatever mental fog still clung to him. A flash of silvery metal under his arm confirmed that the likur was still in place, and what little Lance understood of their functionality told him that it would be an odd and confusing experience. There was a reason certain concentrated forms of Quintessence were used as recreational drugs.

Thace had already stalked over to Grelk, the coordinator for this particular safehouse. They'd moved Keith here so that he wouldn't be alone when the others went out on a job, after all, and Thace wanted to know how no one had noticed that their charge was not only awake, but stumbling around like a newborn kitten. (Those weren't the exact words Thace used, but Lance thought it an appropriate comparison.)

He left Thace to the lecturing and joined Akira in supporting Keith, who might have had more success pulling away if he didn't keep tripping over his own feet.

"All right, samurai," Lance said, touching Keith's jaw to catch his attention. Keith turned at once, staring wide-eyed and unwavering at Lance until Lance's face began to heat up. Akira smothered a laugh, and Lance cleared his throat. "Let's sit down, and we'll catch you up on what happened."

"But…" Keith paused, his ears folding back. He searched for whatever protest he'd meant to give, but didn't put up much of a fight as Lance and Akira steered him back into the bedroom. It was small and plain: a bed for Keith, one of the few in the whole safe house, and a cot beside it for Lance. It sat at an angle now, like Keith had tripped over it on his way to the door. Lance wondered if he'd heard their return, and if that was why he'd gotten up when he did.

Aside from the bed and the cot, there was only a small bedside table and some lights on the walls, all turned down low. Keith had been in and out of it for the last few days as the likur did its work. Thace had cut back on the painkillers once they had the device, but he still needed a low dose every now and then. That, combined with the disorientation from the likur, had left Keith mostly incoherent even when he was awake, and he hadn't tried to get up before now.

As soon as they sat on the side of the bed, Keith tried to lay down, and Lance reached out to stop him. "You've got a thing on your back," he said, grasping for a short, simple explanation of the likur and coming up empty. "If you want to lay down, you should lay on your stomach."

Keith stared at him with the slightest pout, and Lance wasn't sure if he hadn't followed Lance's logic or if he didn't want to lay down, after all. Shaking his head, Lance scooted back against the wall and tugged on Keith's arm until he leaned back with a contented sigh. The angle of one of the likur's legs dug uncomfortably into Lance's side, but Keith seemed comfortable enough.

"What happened?" Keith asked. He'd tucked his head under Lance's chin almost at once--and without any of the insecurity that usually preceded the instigation of cuddling--but his ear twitched as he shifted. "And why's Akira here?"

"You got hurt," Akira said. "Red sent me to help."

Keith grunted, apparently satisfied with that explanation. Lance supposed when Red was your lion, you got used to a certain kind of candor. It didn't matter how Keith had gotten hurt, or how Akira had found him. Red had sent him. That was, apparently, all that needed to be said.

Lance turned the situation over in his head, debating whether and when to bring up the question of how much Keith remembered--and of how much Arel had done to spread word of Keith and Lance's presence in the city. Keith was something of a celebrity by now, Mirek's people having spun the story of his heroic sacrifice into a kind of propaganda piece that made Lance deeply uncomfortable. Arel had cut away from the live broadcast soon after Keith was injured, focusing heavily on the Red Lion once she appeared. (She was, Lance would admit, an excellent diversion.) Unfortunately, someone in the city had recorded a copy of that footage, and despite Arel agreeing not to rebroadcast it, it kept cropping up--the footage and aggrandized versions of events.

It was probably best to leave that for when Keith was more lucid.

Keith, for his part, seemed to have gotten what answers he needed. He had Lance; Akira's presence made sense; and so he seemed content to melt into Lance, the barest hint of a purr entering his breath as he turned to nuzzle closer against Lance's neck. Lance pulled him close against his side, too overwhelmed at having Keith awake and aware to be embarrassed at the dopey grin he was sure had stolen across his face.

Akira, at least, had stopped laughing, though the fondness in his eyes as he watched Lance and Keith was almost as bad.

That was okay, though. After several days of uncertainty and near constant fighting, it was nice just to have a moment to bask in Keith's presence.

Thace appeared in the doorway a moment later, clearing his throat. Keith tensed almost imperceptibly, and Lance looked down to find him staring at Thace through slitted eyes. Frowning, Lance rubbed Keith's arm, trying to get him to calm down.

"Keith?" Thace asked, tactfully ignoring Keith's glare. "How are you feeling?"

Keith gave a noncommittal grunt, and Akira turned to frown at him.

Thace's face was unreadable. "Can I take a look at your back? I think we might be able to remove the likur today. It would be more comfortable for you without it, I think."

Once more, Keith only grunted, though he did look up at Lance when he squeezed his shoulder. For a long moment, they only stared at each other, Keith looking as stubborn as he ever had. Then, huffing, Keith let his head loll back. "Fine."

Lance bit down on his amusement as he helped Keith lay face-down on the bed, his arms crossed beneath his chin. "You sound like Mateo did when he was little and Meri tried to bribe him into going to sleep."

Keith flicked an ear at Lance.

Akira laughed, but the mood soured as soon as Lance helped Keith push his shirt up to his shoulders. The likur covered a good portion of Keith's back, still glowing faintly, though the Quintessence in the bulb had drained to the point that the light hadn't showed through Keith's shirt. The burns looked much better now, but the likur was no cryopod. There were still scars--faint, shiny, lavender patches that stretched between bits of fuzzy new fur across his lower back, where his armor hadn't protected him from the blistering heat of the explosion. It was too late by now to undo the scarring, even if they'd had access to a cryopod, so Keith would likely have the scars--and the bald patches--forever, but that was a superficial concern compared to the internal damage from the explosion.

Lance didn't know the extent of Keith's internal injuries. Thace had conferred with a resistance medic who had come to help relocate Keith. He'd come out of that conversation grim, but no more concerned than he had been before. Keith was hurt, yes, but they'd already known that. And with the likur to accelerate his recovery, he wasn't in any substantive danger.

Thace removed the likur now, and Lance, seated near Keith's head, saw him wince as the claws detached. Lance hadn't figured out what sort of adhesive they used; they didn't look sticky, and they didn't leave any visible marks on the skin, just some flattened fur. He took Keith's hand and squeezed all the same, and Keith squeezed back.

With the likur out of the way, Thace leaned in to examine Keith's scars, then ran a handheld scanner down the length of his torso. After examining the results for a long moment, he nodded and set the likur aside. "Everything's looking good. You'll need to take it easy for the next few days, of course, but you're beyond the worst of it."

Keith wrinkled his nose and pushed himself upright, shaking his head like he was trying to clear it of the lingering effects of Quintessence therapy. "Take it easy? I can't--" He squeezed his eyes shut, ears twitching violently. "The 301--The resistance-- I can't just abandon them."

"We aren't abandoning them," Lance said, holding his hands up in a calming gesture. "We're still fighting, okay? Vit's a tough bastard, but we're making progress."

"We are," Thace said, a little more sharply. "Which means you don't need to worry about any of that. Focus on recovery, and let us worry about the Empire."

That was the wrong thing to say to Keith, and Lance thought Thace ought to have known that. They'd only spent the last eight months working together. "How am I supposed to not worry about the Empire?" Keith demanded. "They own the entire universe."

"And they almost _killed_ you last week, Keith." Thace's voice usually got low when he was angry, so the fact that he spoke at something approaching a shout, rising as he did so, stopped Keith's response in its tracks. He stared up at his uncle, blinking, before shrinking back and glaring at the wall.

Thace deflated at once, raising one hand to massage his forehead.

"I'm not asking you to bow out of this war--though cosmos know how much I wish you didn't have to fight. All I'm asking is that you not throw yourself back into battle before your body is ready for that kind of strain. For the sake of the people who care about you, if nothing else."

Thace waited through a long, awkward silence, during which Keith tried and failed to come up with a response. Then Thace nodded, grabbed the likur from the foot of the bed, and withdrew.

"He's just worried about you, you know," Lance said, resuming his spot against the wall and holding out a hand to Keith. "We thought you were going to die. We couldn't get back to the castle-ship, and as near as we can tell from what intel Thace has managed to steal, the others couldn't break through the orbital forces to come get us."

Keith stared at his outstretched hand for a long moment--still a little foggy from the Quintessence, it seemed--then sighed and accepted the tacit offer, leaning up against Lance. He wasn't quite as boneless as he'd been before, and he drew his knees up to his chest, wrapping one arm around them. "I know he's worried, but…"

"But…?" Lance prompted.

"But nothing. I don't know." Keith huffed, turning his face into the bend of Lance's neck. "I don't know anything."

"That's a funny thing to say," Lance observed.

Growling irritably, Keith went on in a mumble, his words slightly slurred--either from the Quintessence or from his posture; Lance couldn't tell. "I thought my mom sent him here to spy on me, but I don't think he likes her very much. I don't know. Tell me what I missed?"

Lance traded looks with Akira, unease churning at the notion that Keith thought his family was spying on him, but Keith wasn't entirely himself right now, and Lance wouldn't have felt right teasing secrets out of him like this. They'd talk about it later, for sure.

For now, he settled in, a sleepy Keith pressed up against his side, and launched into a retelling of the last few days.

* * *

The Coalition had found Balmeran refugees.

The news caught Shay by surprise, and she had already taken down the coordinates for their home ship before she thought to ask what they were refugees _of_. Escaped prisoners who had fled their own captive Balmera? People who had been taken, as Rax has been taken, and whom Voltron's allies had rescued in a strike against the Empire?

Or survivors of a cataclysm akin to what they had found along the Paths?

Shay's tongue became as stone in her mouth, and she sang distress to Hunk, who deftly took over the conversation, plying the clerk who had contacted them for additional details. There were few to be had; the Nemian fleet had welcomed a number of smugglers and wanderers into its ranks some months ago. The Balmerans among them had not volunteered information about their past beyond the fact that they had no home to which they could return.

"Captain Coran reached out to us," the clerk said. "Said you were looking for Balmerans. You can talk to them if you want. Maybe they'll open up to the paladins of Voltron."

And so they went. There was more to be done elsewhere--always more--but Hunk and Yellow were in accordance with Shay on this matter: there was much to be learned here. And if it had to do with the Vkullor-like attacks that had wiped out a Migration, then they could not afford any delay.

Still, Shay's heart did not cease to pound as she opened a wormhole to the coordinates the clerk had provided and eased Yellow through into quiet space.

The fleet was not at all what Shay had been expecting--not the swarm of tiny fighters surrounding a central command ship, as it was with the Castle of Lions and the Voltron Guard, nor the formidable array of battle-ready (if mismatched) military vessels of the Kera Sector rebellion.

This fleet was eclectic. Likely all her members had brought their own ships when they joined, or else they had stolen or salvaged whatever was available. But unlike Anamuri's forces, very few of these looked ready for battle. Some were outfitted with a cannon or two; nearly all of them had shield generators grafted to their hulls like cave beetles clinging to exposed crystal. They appeared to be merchant vessels, even perhaps some private transports, never intended to become a permanent home for their crew. But then, one had to make do when living under the shadow of the Empire.

Hunk spoke with the leader of this small fleet while Shay's heart continued its endeavor to escape her chest. The paladins had been expected, it seemed. The officer (if officer was the correct term; he did not appear to be a military man) did not seem happy to have them there, precisely, but he put up no fight as he directed them to the Balmerans' ship.

They took a pod over, as the small ship could have almost fit inside Yellow's cargo hold. Shay did not recognize the species of the individual who greeted them, a diminutive furred race with neon yellow streaks down both sides of their neck.

"Paladins," they said curtly. "We are Lullellan, technicians for the _Sulessa_."

"It's nice to meet you, Lullellan. I'm Hunk, and this is Shay."

Lullellan touched their two-fingered hand to their chest. "Welcome. We will lead you to our crewmates, the Balmerans, but we must ask you to mind your questions. What they have seen is no joy to relive, and we do not wish them undue distress."

"Nor do we," Shay assured them. "I know this will not be easy to speak of, and I thank them for their willingness to speak at all. I cannot promise that our questions will be painless, but we will keep our conversation brief."

Lullellan nodded, then turned and waved for Shay and Hunk to follow them down the cramped corridors of the _Sulessa_. They passed two others of their species, and it took until the second had faded from view for Shay to realize that it was not mere familiarity that let Lullellan and their fellows move around one another with such ease. She had seen this too often among her own people not to recognize the motions of two who shared a deep connection. In this case, perhaps it was more direct than the Balmera song. A hive mind? Or something like it.

"In here," Lullellan said, gesturing to a door no different from the others they had passed. It opened silently at their touch, and they led the way into a small crew quarters, where three Balmerans sat side by side on one of the two low beds. Lullellan crossed to them, and they exchanged conversation in low tones for a few moments before Lullellan nodded and straightened up. "Then we will leave you. Do not hesitate to call if you have need."

"We will not, Lu," one of the Balmerans said. " _Pax_."

She spoke to a melody that Shay almost recognized. Without a Balmera close at hand, she could catch only glimpses of the song, but something about it struck a chord in her.

They sang of loss, and of a grief so deep it could not be contained in words.

"I'm sorry," Hunk said after Lullellan closed the door. Shay wondered if he, too, heard the unspoken sorrow, and if he understood what it was he felt. "I'm sure it's not easy to talk about this."

"It is not," said the Balmeran who had spoken before. "But we have already agreed."

Shay nodded. "And we are grateful. I am Shay, and this is Hunk, my heart-mate. We are the yellow paladins of Voltron."

The Balmeran's eyes widened at the word _heart-mate_ , but she made no comment on the union. "Mex," she said, touching a hand to her chest. "This is my brother, Cli, and his heart-mate Phen."

Hunk murmured a greeting, and Shay sang a somber harmony. "I am glad to meet you," she said, "though I wish it could have been under better circumstances."

"I as well," Mex said. "You wished to speak to us, though. Of the destruction of our home?"

Shay's heart sank. "Then it _was_ destroyed. I had hoped…" She trailed off, then shook her head. "My sorrow for your loss. When did it happen?"

"Half a year," Mex said, "if I have learned the Imperial calendar well. They did not give us the means to track time on our Balmera. We had our own systems, but without the crystals' cycle…"

Hunk took a seat on the edge of the second bed, facing the Balmerans across the room. "The Imperials," he said. "So you _were_ prisoners."

"Of course we were," Cli said, the strident tones of his voice making him sound younger than Shay had taken him for at first glance. "You think we worked for them willingly?"

Hunk held up his hands as Shay sat beside him. "No. We thought you might have come from a free Balmera is all."

"A free Balmera?" Mex gave a sharp laugh. "A myth, you mean."

"We think not." Shay leaned forward, pouring earnestness into her song. "We have attempted to track the Migratory Paths of old, and we found the aftermath of… an attack. Perhaps the same as took your Balmera, I know not. That is why we are here."

A horrified silence fell over the other three Balmerans, even stopping their song in its tracks. Phen reached out for Cli without breaking their silence, and Cli took their hand and pressed it to his chest.

"Our Balmera was dying," Mex said, audibly straining for calm. "The Galra had abused her more than she could take. They worked us harder and harder, until one day… they left. We awoke to find them all gone--the sentries who watched us in the mines, the foremen at the great elevators, even those who lived on the surface. They had left everything behind, even some of their ships."

"My sister knew something was wrong," Cli said. "She tried to tell the Elders. She said we had to leave before a calamity befell us." He paused, turning to watch his sister. "They did not listen. Only Phen and I went with her to the hangars."

Mex closed her eyes. "I had never flown before, but I got us off the ground. There was a fleet in the air, but they paid us no mind. They had all withdrawn--afraid, I think, to get caught up in what was to come."

"And… what was that?" Hunk asked.

"A monster." Mex looked Shay in the eyes, her song quick and pained such that it lodged in Shay's chest and ached. "A beast unlike any I had seen before, or any I have seen since. It could have curled itself around our Balmera and touched its tail to its snout, had it the mind to do so. Instead, it attacked. We watched it tear our home stone from stone, and then when it was done, the Galra took it, and they left. We combed the wreckage for survivors, but found none. We alone escaped."

"We overheard a transmission as the monster did its work," Cli said, curling in on himself. "They said... They said it had been a successful test, and to tell someone called Haggar that her pet was ready to be deployed."

* * *

"You want to take me _where_?" Coran asked.

Val slouched low in the pilot's seat and grinned. "The Heart? I'm pretty sure you can go. You're bonded to Blue, too."

That was true, but even so Coran found himself pushing back against the notion of him-- _him_ \--visiting the Heart of the Blue Lion. That was a special, almost sacred place, and it was reserved for the paladins alone. At least, that was what Alfor had always said, and Coran was inclined to believe him.

Still, he couldn't deny the pull of the Heart. He'd often wondered what it was like. And Val's barely-contained excitement wasn't doing anything to dissuade him.

"I suppose it's worth a try…" he said slowly, probing the bond. Val's excitement and Nyma's confusion were plain to read, as were--more distantly--Meri's tension and Lance's sharp relief. (Keith must have woken up; Coran could think of nothing else that would hit so hard as the wave of emotion that had nearly bowled him over on the bridge a few hours ago.) Blue's mind was a more nebulous presence. In fact, it had taken Coran some weeks to realize that he could sense her at all. Her emotions tended to be deep and slow, which made them difficult to pick out from the stronger, quicker moods of her pilots.

He thought she seemed optimistic, however. That was encouraging.

Val grinned wider, gesturing Coran to the seat beside her own. Meri's, if Coran recalled correctly. Nyma took Val's seat a bit further to the side as Val had taken Lance's usual spot to fly them out some distance from the castle, and Nyma's own post was above the cockpit in the gunnery nest. Coran sat, a touch awkwardly, behind the controls for weapons, shields, and a number of elements Coran didn't recognize from the castle's bridge.

"Okay, uh… Blue? We're probably going to need some help here." Val cocked her head to the side as Blue purred a response, and then she smiled at Coran. "Don't worry. She'll help out. You just focus on the bond. Or… on us, I guess? I don't know. Nyma, how would you describe it?"

"Freaky and confusing," Nyma said dryly. Her lip quirked upward when Val twisted to glare at her. "Hey, I'm not so good at this myself. I usually follow you in. Or Blue just grabs me by the heart and yanks."

Blue rumbled again, amusement suffusing Coran's thoughts. It might have been his own, but he thought it likely that that was Blue, watching her paladins bicker with no small degree of affection. He closed his eyes, letting the emotions wash over him. It wasn't true contentment, not quite. Not with Meri still living on a razor's edge and Lance still too aware of the war to completely drop his guard. But here in this cockpit, for just a moment, the war seemed like a distant memory, and the currents of love and hope set him drifting.

He thought, at first, that he was falling asleep, but when he tried to shake himself awake, something closed tight around his chest--not a threat, but an embrace. He realized, belatedly, that Val and Nyma had fallen silent. His awareness of them dimmed for a moment, though his awareness of Meri and Lance remained unchanged. The same thing had been happening a lot lately, though he'd been too busy with his own work to consider what that might mean. His awareness often faded to the background, only peaking when emotions ran high.

In the next moment, something shifted. He could only describe it as the wind of Val's passing, though it didn't feel very much like a wind at all. A moment later, Nyma followed after Val, and before Coran could try to puzzle out how to do the same, he was moving. It was, as Nyma had described, very much like something pulling at his core, dragging him along down darkened, disorienting paths.

He blinked, and found himself standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking a dazzling blue sea. The smell of salt on the air reminded him of his travels as a younger man--of strange worlds and new people to meet and a discovery awaiting him with each sunrise. He turned, expecting to see Val and Nyma beside him, but he was alone on the cliff. Behind him, the land rose steeply toward the peak of a towering mountain; below, waves crashed on a black-sand beach. He seemed to have landed beside a road of some sort, and when he followed it around to his left, it led his eye to a tall, slender tower shining a light out over the sea.

Frowning, Coran searched for Val and Nyma in the bond, but that only confused him more. They felt close--impossibly so. And not just them. Lance and Meri might have been looking over his shoulder, too. Coran had never sensed them so clearly, or with such nuance. Meri's tension was more focused now, concentrated on specific people. On Haggar, yes, but also on people Coran was unfamiliar with, though he could feel the shape of them in Meri's emotions. Lance, too, had an undercurrent of worry in his pressing relief to have Keith up and at it again.

The moment of recognition when Val found Nyma pulled Coran's mind back to them, and he tried to sort through what he was sensing. Exasperation from Nyma, bright with amusement, but beneath that, relief soured by guilt and fear. And Val was a tizzy of worry that bordered on panic. Coran wanted to reach out to her, to comfort her.

He realized her worry was for him at the same moment that Val and Nyma appeared together on the grass beside him. Val's panic burst like a bubble at the sight of him, and she rushed over, flinging her arms around his neck.

"I'm so sorry! I completely forgot that we all come in at different places. I should have warned you."

"No need for that," Coran said, rubbing her back. "I hardly had time to miss you. This place is…"

Nyma breathed out a laugh, and Val pulled away from Coran to frown at her. Nyma arched an eyebrow and gestured toward the lighthouse. "Look where he ended up. Blue pulled him right where he needed to be. How come she doesn't do that for us?"

She said this last bit with a raised voice, her head tilted back to shout at the sky, and Coran felt a twinge of exasperation, distantly, from Blue. She gave no other answer.

"Doesn't matter," Val said, shaking out her hands and turning toward the lighthouse. "We're here; that's what's important."

"Right, we're here," Nyma said. "Now what?"

"Now, we experiment." Val grinned and jogged up the road toward the lighthouse, gesturing for the others to follow. "Nyma knows some of this, but I've been experimenting, right? Ever since we projected to the homeworld, I've been trying to figure out how to get it to work again, and something about this lighthouse seems to make it easier."

"Have we figured out why that is?" Nyma asked.

Val's steps slowed, and she tipped her head back to stare up at the top of the lighthouse. "I'm not totally sure, but… I have a feeling this place is… I don't know if it is the actual Heart of the Blue Lion, because I don't know what that means for where we show up, but I'm pretty sure Blue is more closely connected to that lighthouse than to the river where I keep dropping in."

"Curious," Coran said. "You four don't arrive in the same location, then?"

Nyma shook her head. "Val shows up in a river, Lance is in the middle of the ocean… Not sure what Meri sees, but I didn't think I showed up anywhere at all until Val came to find me the first time."

"There's not much to see," Val said. "I'll give you that. It's like being inside a crazy-thick fog bank, but it definitely is _somewhere_."

Coran hummed, intrigued, but whatever there was to figure out about all that, he wasn't likely to be the one to crack the code, particularly not when he was stuck in one place and for a completely different purpose.

As though sensing his thoughts, Val skipped on ahead and rapped her knuckles on the lighthouse wall. "Anyway, when I'm here, I can boost my bilocation. As far as I've figured out, there's still no way for me to physically appear somewhere further than orbital range, but I can stretch farther if I astral project or whatever."

"Have you made it back to the homeworld?" Coran asked.

"Not yet." Val made a face. "I guess my range isn't _that_ big yet. Might have been adrenaline that did it. I mean, Blue was freaking out, and once Lance was safe inside Red, it started getting hard to hold the projection. I don't know about Nyma, but I was still pretty wired at that point. Blue seemed more calm when we came back to her, though."

It seemed as reasonable a theory as any other. Certainly in Alteans--as in most species Coran had known--adrenaline fueled feats that were simply not possible under normal circumstances. The same could very well hold true here.

"Well, one step at a time," he said, joining Val by the wall. "You obviously didn't want me here for the adrenaline of it, so what are you testing?"

"Familiarity." Val pursed her lips, still staring at the wall as though trying to find her way to Lance. "That came up in the books I got from Oriande. Bilocation, teleportation, telepathy--it all requires 'familiarity' with the target. I'm not still not sure what that means from a metaphysical stance, but it does seem to be a factor in all of this. Before today, I'd only bilocated to the other blue paladins or Blue herself, or else it was a really close-range bilocation to a _place_ I was familiar with."

Crossing her arms, Nyma leaned forward until she caught Val's eyes. "Before today?"

Val grinned. "I had an idea, and I tested it out while you were going to get Coran. Sticking with people on the castle-ship, since I know I can reach that far. I found Nyma no problem. You, too, Coran. But when I tried a couple of people I don't really know--Tev and some of the Guard pilots I've run missions with--I couldn't get to them. Shiro and Allura and Matt? No problem. Mrs. H and Eli? Took me a few tries, but I got to them eventually, but no luck with Hunk's moms."

Nyma shook her head, shifting her weight onto one hip. "So what? You have to know the person you're projecting to. We could have guessed that already."

"But now we have confirmation that I can use Blue's power boost to reach someone who isn't a blue paladin--who isn't a paladin at all!" Val caught her lip between her teeth and rose up on her toes. "But at the same time, it does mean that as of right now I can't get to Rolo or Commander Holt. I can work on range, try to figure out some workaround for the adrenaline issue--if that's really what's going on there. But we need to figure out how to get me familiar with people I've only met briefly, if at all."

Coran smoothed his mustache, considering the problem. He recalled Val proposing a few solutions to the question of familiarity, but if they were here in the Heart and not up on the training deck with the mind-meld, then that narrowed things down quite a bit.

"You want to try a tandem projection?"

"I guess?" Val spread her arms. "Look, I'm flying blind here. All I know is it's going to be easier if I can use someone else's familiarity to orient me, instead of having to go digging around in private memories in the hopes of making something click. We can always try that later, anyway. Besides, if I'm going to be able to do this with anyone, it's going to be someone else who's connected to Blue."

"Then why me and not Nyma?" Coran asked. "Or have you already tried…?" Coran didn't have to finish the question to see the answer on their faces. They hadn't tried it, but neither thought there was much point.

"Come on, Coran," Nyma said. "I'm not exactly the type to go around making friends all over the place. The only people I'm going to know well enough are either the same people Val knows or are a few galaxies away."

A twinge of melancholy accompanied this statement, deeper than could be explained by some sort of guilt at not being useful. Coran frowned at her, but Val was already blazing ahead, pressing Coran's hand to the lighthouse and covering it with her own.

"We need to start somewhere. Focus on…" Val hesitated, then cursed. "Pidge is rubbing off on me. Focus on Allura first. Let's make sure we can even do tandem projections in the first place."

Coran obliged, focusing on Allura as, beside him, Val did the same. With Nyma's roiling emotions plucking at his concentration, it was difficult, and Val twice vanished without taking Coran with her. It took her several long moments to return each time, and an awkward silence descended between Coran and Nyma each time she left.

She persisted, however, adamant that she felt something there and just had to get a good hold on Coran. Coran did his level best to focus, but when she vanished a third time, he yielded to the nagging in the back of his head and turned to Nyma.

"Is everything all right?"

Nyma's head snapped up, a guarded expression closing across her face. Coran wondered if she was aware that she'd taken a step back. "Fine," she said. "Why?"

Coran didn't answer immediately, but weighed his words. Of all the blue paladins, Nyma was the one he knew the least, but he knew she valued her privacy and didn't take well to meddling. He held up his hands and offered a disarming smile. "I'm your adjunct, remember. And the bond seems to be stronger here. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to, but--"

"Have you heard anything about Ryloss?"

The question came out in a rush, and Coran paused to let the words process. "Ryloss?"

Nyma flushed, turning her shoulder toward Coran. " _Vrekt._ No, it's stupid. Forget I said anything."

Borrowed shame crawled beneath his skin, and hurt, and fear, and--

Homesickness.

"Ah." Coran stepped forward, reaching out slowly to rest a hand on her shoulder. "Your home planet?"

Nyma flinched, but she'd come a long way since Blue had chosen her. She was reluctant to talk about this, but she didn't shut him out. Not yet. "There was a distress call a week or so ago. I figured it was coming. Paid off a couple of your techs to tell me if they heard anything from there."

Coran's indignation prickled at the notion of his staff being bribed--indignation and a deeper unease. He'd been thinking too much about the spy lately, and though they all agreed that the techs didn't have anything like the clearance the spy had demonstrated, Coran didn't like to think that one of them could be bribed so easily. Perhaps it was that it was Nyma doing the asking--as a paladin, she probably could have just given them the order and have them obey, and they'd taken the money out of simple greed. With luck, that was all.

He'd have to look into it, in any case.

"You didn't forward the distress call to the paladins, obviously," he said. "The Guard?"

Nyma nodded. "I didn't want to get into it, okay? Especially not with Val. She wouldn't understand. Family's everything to her, but I'm… I haven't seen my family in ten _years_. I want them to be safe, but it's not-- It wouldn't be--"

She gave a discontented growl and fell silent, but Coran saw the picture of it well enough in her emotions. There was a lot of hurt and anger and guilt mixed up with the idea of home. It wasn't something that was easy to put into words, but Coran understood just the same.

"I'm not sure I've heard anything in particular," he said. "But I could look into it when we're done here, if you like?"

Nyma remained stubbornly where she was, glaring out over the cliff's edge to avoid Coran's eyes, but she nodded. "I'd appreciate that."

Smiling, Coran patted her back, and when Val reappeared once more, he returned to the lighthouse for another try at tandem projection.

* * *

Meri felt sick from the moment she woke up. Today was another day of private lessons, of trying not to throw up as Haggar ripped prisoners' minds apart, of shutting down the part of her that recoiled from mind magics so she could take the early steps in her own studies. She had to do this. She had to be ready to cover her tracks. She couldn't let Haggar find out what she'd done and counteract it.

Most importantly, she couldn't let any of this show on her face, or in the surface-level thoughts that floated in the air around them like glittering stardust.

Mind magic was a curious thing. Reza could appreciate its intimacies in a way Meri would never be able to. Reza could see the complexity of the spell, the delicate balance between offense and defense that needed to be maintained. Delving into someone else's mind meant, of necessity, that you were exposing yourself at the same time. Just by being in the room with Haggar while she was working her magic, Meri's thoughts rose to the surface and fluttered away, little restless butterflies just waiting to be caught.

Haggar was far too busy with her work to bother peering into Reza's thoughts, of course, but it still made Meri uncomfortable, being so exposed. So she sank deeper into the act, letting Reza rise to the forefront.

And Reza, for her part, was hungry to know more. She hovered as Haggar pried open the contents of the prisoner's mind, and she pushed forward, eager to see for herself what it felt like to invade another's mind. (She _needed_ this. She _needed_ to be ready.)

She _wanted_ to prove herself.

"You have done well, Reza," Haggar said as the prisoner was taken away. Back to their cell to recover, if they could. Those who weren't broken by these interrogations returned stronger, their minds building up defenses against invaders. It would make for a good challenge, once Reza had more practice. (She had to imagine Haggar's mind was stronger than any other, after years and years of practice.) "You know the basics, and you excel in every measure."

Pride warmed her through, and she bowed her head so Haggar couldn't see the conflict in her eyes. It wasn't just Reza who had warmed to the praise; some part of Meri craved validation, too. (Because it meant her position was secure, she told herself. She didn't want Haggar's approval, only her complacence.)

"Thank you, Lady Haggar," she said, once she trusted her voice to be level. "I do try."

Haggar's claws caught Meri's chin, tilting her head up until their eyes met. "You are hungry. I have seen this in you. Hungry for power. Hungry for glory. Valuable qualities, both, in a servant of the Empire, but only if you have the skill to back them up."

"I do," Meri said, her voice cracking with her fervor, and her fear. "Let me prove myself, Lady Haggar. I won't let you down."

Haggar smiled, her grip on Meri's chin tightening almost to the point of pain. "So eager… Very well." She made a sharp gesture with her free hand, and the far door opened, admitting a guard, who dragged a prisoner in behind him. "Let's see how well you do."

Meri quailed, retreating deeper, shutting off her guilt and shame and letting herself be Reza. Only Reza. She would do as Haggar asked. She would do more. She would prove herself the greatest druid to ever pass through these halls…

And then she would make them all pay.


	41. The Jessaranti Asteroid Belt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... After being injured in a battle against Vit on the Galra homeworld, Keith is finally back on his feet, though for now the fight still rests on Lance, Thace, and Akira's shoulders. They're stranded on the homeworld for the time being on account of the spy on the castle-ship, who foiled a recent rescue attempt. Shiro and Allura are heading up the investigation into the spy's identity, and so far evidence seems to be pointing toward Eniola Layeni, Akira's second-in-command in the Voltron Guard. Security isn't the only concern here, as suspicions are running high and threatening to tear the Guard apart.
> 
> Meanwhile, Hunk and Shay are still searching for free Balmera--and now, more urgently, searching for something to prove or disprove the apparent Vkullor attack that happened recently at one of the locations they searched. And Pidge and Ryner, having received a tip from Meri, have gone to investigate a Vindication lab located somewhere in the Jessaranti Asteroid Belt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I've seen season 8. No, it won't be affecting this story in any way. (That's probably obvious, since I've only pulled a handful of characters and names from the last few seasons, but hey. Now you know.)
> 
> Also, this is your Official Warning as we head into the climax of season three: from this point on, any trigger warnings that appear in the start-of-chapter notes may very well contain bigger-than-usual spoilers (non-specific, but still.) If you don't want to know what's coming, skip over the notes on future chapters. I'll put any non-tw notes at the end of the chapter, so you won't be missing out on anything except the trigger warnings by skipping over this section.
> 
> Enjoy!

"So what's going on with you and Keith?" Lance, who was stationed on the far side of the roof from Thace overlooking the plaza below, didn't turn as he asked the question, but he did fidget in place as Thace arched an eyebrow in his direction.

They were here, ostensibly, on reconnaissance. Keith was still recovering, and Akira had taken the Red Lion on a run against an unmanned, low-priority target--something flashy to put on a show for the people of the 301 but nothing that required any great skill. Akira was getting better at handling the lion, but she apparently didn't like him flying her when Keith's life wasn't in immediate danger. Without her help, he said, it was like trying to maneuver a G-class freighter at top speed. Thace may not have known what a G-class freighter was, but he understood the sentiment.

Thace had volunteered for this job mainly as a way to keep busy. He'd seen speculation in internal memos pulled from Vit's server suggesting the Imperials were considering holding public executions here, but nothing had been scheduled. Still, it was a good idea to be prepared, and casing a location was familiar enough a task as to be welcome after the excitement of the last few days.

Lance's presence was somewhat less justified, so Thace wasn't particularly surprised to find the boy had an ulterior motive for coming along. He _was_ surprised they'd lasted this long without it coming out. Almost an hour of watching the traffic flow below and capturing images of the plaza, which was bounded on one side by the district offices for the Imperial Police and on two others by privately-owned office buildings. Perfect staging areas for Imperial troops, if Vit decided to put his plan into action. Thace made a note of that on his gauntlet, then went back to peering through his binoculars at a cross-street that struck him as potentially valuable.

"I'm afraid you're going to have to be more specific."

Lance's gaze prickled along the back of Thace's neck. "Have you two even _talked_ since he woke up?"

Thace pressed his lips together. He had not, in fact, spoken with Keith in the past few days. He'd approached once or twice, just to see how his recovery was progressing, but Keith's tension spiked every time he saw Thace coming, pulling at his eyes and at his shoulders. Injured as he was, he didn't need the added stress.

Thace had yet to determine if this particular tension was elevated by Keith's perceived vulnerability, or perhaps some lingering shame over the injuries he had sustained. It was entirely possible that it had always been there, and Keith was simply too tired these days to keep it under wraps. Either way, it made no difference. Keith had every right to his own boundaries, and Keena had disregarded them enough for the both of them.

"I've been busy," Thace told Lance.

"Bullshit."

Thace breathed out, calling on years of experience not to rise to the provocation. "Has he been asking after me, then?"

Lance hesitated. "Well… no. Not exactly."

"Hmm." Thace switched to an infrared view and made note of the rooms in the district offices and neighboring buildings that were unoccupied.

Heaving a sigh, Lance shifted. A flash of light told Thace he'd dismissed his bayard--his preferred method of scoping out the street below, despite the fact that neither of them expected combat today. He didn't approach Thace, but he was surely watching him now, calculating in a way only Lance could be--not as though he was trying to find an advantage, but only seeking to understand.

"I don't get it," Lance said. "You're family, aren't you?"

 _Family._ The word punctured Thace's careful professionalism, awakening an ache--and a guilt--he'd endeavored to bury deep these last few months. Whatever hurts Thace had inflicted on himself with his choices, they paled in comparison to what Keith had suffered, and he refused to give in to self-pity.

Setting his binoculars aside, Thace glanced over his shoulder. "You're close with your family, I assume?"

Lance tilted his head to the side, his lips pursed. "I mean, yeah. What's that got to do with anything?"

Thace allowed himself a small smile, which only deepened Lance's confusion. "I sincerely hope you never have cause to understand." He paused as Lance made a low, perplexed sound, then turned fully around. "You have a good family, Lance. Loyal, supportive, loving. They taught you to trust--to trust yourself, and to trust others. It is a strength of yours I've seen time and again since we began working together. Keith… Keith didn't have that. Not until this last year, anyway. You and the rest of your team are more family to Keith than Keena or I could ever be."

"Oh, come on. You're still family! You're here, aren't you?"

Thace leaned back against the retaining wall surrounding the rooftop they'd claimed for their observations. "I am. I came, in part, to begin to make restitution for the mistakes I have made. And it _is_ only a beginning. I have not been a presence in Keith's life for nearly fifteen years; I can hardly expect six months to change that."

For a long moment, Lance was silent, apparently turning Thace's words over in his mind. Thace watched, and waited, and when it became clear that Lance wasn't going to speak any time soon, Thace turned back to his work. He was passably familiar with this area by now, but he wanted to run some plans by Mirek when they were through, and that meant capturing a model of the plaza from different angles. He sent a request for camera drones to Arel, who was running ops for several teams out in the district today.

While he was still waiting for a response, Lance finally found his voice.

"This isn't really about you, is it? It's not even about Keith's dad--I don't need to know all the details to know he was an asshole." Lance paused, his boots scuffing across the rooftop. "This is about Keena."

Thace stilled, still staring at his comms screen. "What makes you say that?"

"Little things." Lance shrugged as Thace turned toward him. "I've seen the way people get around her, okay? Matt hates her guts; I think Akira is headed that way. Keith seems--He--" Lance wrapped his arms around himself, glancing aside. "I've only seen Keith scared, like, twice, but I can't find any other word for how he gets when his mom's around. And you…"

Thace stared Lance down, unblinking, and let nothing of his feelings for his sister show on his face.

Lance snorted. "Fine. Don't say anything. I saw the way you got between them when we were leaving. You're trying to protect him from her, aren't you?"

A familiar instinct welled up in Thace, threatening to break through his composure, and he turned away before Lance could see any more than he already had. Protectiveness was not a drive with which Thace was particularly familiar. He had protected people before, certainly, but as an agent of the Accords, such decisions had always been driven by cold logic. It was the only way he could function, when no act came without a cost. Sentimentality had not been something he could afford in his line of work.

Well, it was sentimentality that was getting the better of him now. Sentimentality, and a fierce desire to ensure that Keena did not douse the flame that still burned at Keith's core. He was a better man than the rest of his family, and Thace wanted very much to protect that.

"If you want to know about Keith's relationship with his mother, you'll have to talk to him." Thace paused, his next words coming on a growl. "I won't betray his trust again."

Lance smiled in the corner of Thace's vision, bright and proud, like this had been some sort of test. It was an unnerving look, even when seen askance, and Thace was caught between his old instinct to meet every perceived challenge with lies and posturing and a fresh, unfamiliar urge toward honesty.

"Don't worry," Lance said with a breathy laugh. "You'll get there soon enough."

"Get where?"

Lance flipped a hand. "You know, with Keith." The hand gesture became a stretch, long and lazy, and Lance climbed to his feet. "You're a good guy, Thace. Keith is going to have to admit that sooner or later. But anyway, are we finished?"

Still a little stunned by Lance's words, Thace took a moment to gather his thoughts. "Go on," he said, waving Lance away. "I'm sure Keith is terrorizing the base by now. You should save them from the raw force of his boredom." Lance didn't move, didn't even laugh at Thace's attempt at a joke, and he cast his gaze skyward with a sigh. "I'll be right behind you. I'm just waiting on word from our eyes above."

Lance's posture relaxed, and he took a step toward the hatch Thace had hacked to give them access to the roof. A ladder within led down to a maintenance stairwell that would exit into an alley on street level.

"Will you at least say hi when you get back?" Lance asked. "Just for a minute?"

Thace recoiled. "I don't know if that's--"

"Just for a minute. Please. I think… I think he knows that you care. He does. He just needs to see it more before he'll really believe it. He needs to see that you're not going to give up on him. He was skittish with us, too, at first. Tried to avoid Matt for ages--even _after_ they synced up inside Red. I know you don't want to push him. That's good. It is. But… you can't just avoid him, either, cause he'll avoid you, too, and then you'll never get anywhere, you know?"

And Lance was so earnest, so genuinely sympathetic to the complexities of the situation--sympathetic in ways Thace honestly hadn't expected for someone who trusted so selflessly, who loved so deeply, who lived so openly--that all Thace could do was nod.

"Okay," he said. "I'll… try."

Lance beamed, backing again toward the hatch. "Okay! We'll be waiting for you."

He was gone before Thace could reconsider.

* * *

"We have a new lead."

Coran's voice was carefully neutral, which somehow exacerbated Hunk's anxiety more than outright panic would have.

"Lead?" he asked, his voice cracking. "What kind of lead?"

"The Paths." Coran glanced at something off-screen. "I forwarded the information you two have gathered to some of Ryner's friends on Olkarion--a little bit of biological expertise might be the key we've been missing, hmm?"

There were lines around his eyes that said there was more to it than in interdisciplinary approach. It was the curse no one wanted to invoke by speaking the word aloud--spy. Hunk had been hearing more whispers lately. Had heard that whoever-it-was had almost gotten Shiro, Allura, and Matt killed the other day. Everyone on the castle-ship was neck deep in the search for the traitor. Hunk and Shay had even offered to come back and help--repeatedly--but Coran insisted their own search was just as important, if not more so.

And, yeah. Hunk supposed a potential Vkullor on the loose was a pretty big priority. Didn't mean _he_ wanted to be the one to find it.

"What did they find?" Shay asked, a cautious hope lending her song a sense of urgency.

"I don't know," Coran said. "I saw that they'd finished their work, but things have been a touch hectic around here lately. Figured it would be quicker for you to reach out to them directly."

Translation: Coran didn't know where the leak was, and if Ryner's friends had found out something about the free Balmera, he didn't want to risk it getting back to Zarkon. Considering what they'd found the last time they tried to follow the Paths, Hunk had to agree. He tried not to be paranoid, but ever since the spy situation had blown up, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the fact that they’d talked about the Paths over the castle’s comms system. They’d used the castle’s resources to try to plot them out.

What if they’d led Zarkon straight to the free Balmera?

Hunk didn’t voice these worries, and Coran sent along the contact information for an Olkari scientist. They contacted her straight away, and just a few minutes into the conversation, even Hunk’s head was spinning with all the unfamiliar jargon.

He waited for her to hit a lull in her lecture, then cleared his throat. "So basically, you've extrapolated from the coordinates we have and plotted the rest of the Migration?"

The Olkari, a woman named Eida, pursed her lips, her antennae twitching, but she nodded. "Essentially, yes."

"We apologize for our haste," Shay said, sliding in with a honeyed voice. "We have reason to believe lives are at stake, so time is of the essence."

Eida seemed mollified by that, and she sent a file over. "This is my best estimate of the full Migratory route Atsiphos and Theros followed. You'll note there are a few variants, but it should provide a starting point. The Metos Migration is considerably less certain, but I've included a few notes."

"Thank you, Eida," Hunk said. "Really. We'll check this out and get back to you."

Eida smiled and ended the call, and Hunk pulled up the map she'd plotted for them. "So the question now is which one we start with. The Atsiphos and Theros Paths might have been abandoned entirely after that attack, but the other is pretty thin."

Shay hesitated for a moment, then tapped the first route, loading the nav information into Yellow's computers. "Anyone who remains on this path is in more immediate danger, and if we find no one, we can be nearly certain that these Paths are abandoned. With the others, we cannot know if a Migration passed through last month, or if one will come tomorrow."

"Makes sense to me," Hunk said. "Let's go."

* * *

"This is bullshit," Matt hissed as soon as the door closed behind the latest "concerned party" who'd come to offer their two cents on who had betrayed the Castle of Lions. He glared at the closed door, clenching his tablet hard enough to hurt. "Ivka again? She's not any more likely to be our spy than I am!"

Shiro reached out and closed a hand around his wrist. "I know, Matt."

"You know what Revinor was like!" Matt clenched his jaw, a helpless rage welling up inside him. "Why would any of the refugees go back to Haggar after what they went through?"

"They wouldn't," Shiro said, his voice infuriatingly calm. "I know that."

"You know it's just because they're Galra. It's the same thing with the Galra from New Altea. There's less than a dozen Galra in the whole Guard, but almost half of these so-called tips are about them? Bull. _Shit._ "

Shiro squeezed Matt's wrist again. "Believe me, Matt, I've noticed."

"Then why are we putting up with this shit?"

Shiro pinched the bridge of his nose. "We set up the tip lines so people wouldn't feel like they had to take matters into their own hands. We invited people to bring their concerns to us so we could put them to rest. I'm skeptical of all these insinuations about the Galra, too, especially Ivka and Henrok, but this only works if we don't let ourselves show even a suggestion of bias."

He had a point, however much Matt hated it. The Guard was one wrong look away from turning on itself. He supposed when you took a bunch of people from a hundred different war-torn worlds and bands of survivors, threw them together, and then told them someone was working against them, they were bound to fracture.

The problem was that the Galra were an easy scapegoat. The accusations against them were as flimsy as everything else Matt had heard, either in-person or in the summaries from the anonymous tip line. _She's always on her comms. He just gives me a bad feeling. They've never lost a pilot, and they're just not good enough for it to be skill._

"I wish Akira was here," Matt grumbled. "I'll bet he could knock some sense into these people."

Shiro's lips twitched. "Literally, I'm sure."

Rolling his eyes, Matt elbowed him in the side. "He's got more tact than that and you know it." Shiro only laughed. Matt smiled along for a moment, but his mood quickly soured again. "It just sucks, you know? Someone's out there actually getting our people killed, but we've got to go chasing all these dead-end leads. Even the ones that aren't flat-out racist are flimsy as hell. This is just people pointing fingers at anyone who rubs them the wrong way!"

From Shiro's grimace, he agreed, but they both know there was nothing else for them to do. Coran was still working with Matt's mother to track down potential Olkari connections; Allura and Layeni were interviewing anyone they'd identified as a legitimate suspect; and that left Shiro and Matt to weed through the flood of tips that had come in. It hadn't even been twenty-four hours yet since they’d opened the lines.

"Maybe we should take a break," Matt said, slumping against Shiro. "I don't want to deal with this right now."

Shiro wrapped an arm around him and kissed the side of his head. "Yeah," he said. "That sounds good."

A timid knock on the door stopped them in the process of packing up, and Matt let out a groan. They'd taken over an office in the heart of Blue Tower for the express purpose of being more accessible to Guardsmen who might want to talk about the situation, but just now Matt was cursing that decision.

Shiro shot him an apologetic look as he pressed the release on the door to let the visitor in. Matt had expected another Guardsman, nervous and stammering or bitter and argumentative. He expected this to end with Shiro holding him back from laying into the person across the table.

Instead, it was Wyn who stood in the door, his hands balling up the collar of his jacket--one Lance had made for him, if Matt wasn't mistaken. He jumped when the door opened, stared at Matt and Shiro like a deer in the headlights, then looked back into the hallway like he was trying to figure out how to leave without getting in trouble.

"Wyn?" Shiro asked, rising from his seat and crossing to the door. "Is everything okay?"

Wyn cringed, his shoulders curling forward. "I'm fine," he said. He didn't sound fine at all.

Matt traded worried looks with Shiro before Shiro pulled Wyn into the room. Matt was frozen halfway out of his seat, his heart in his throat, though he wasn't sure yet what he was nervous about. Wyn moved easily as Shiro guided him into the room with a hand on his shoulder, and he sat without prompting in one of the chairs facing the desk. Shiro took the other, turning it so he was facing Wyn across a respectful distance.

"You're..." Wyn bit his lip, darting a look at Shiro before dropping his gaze once more. "You're looking for the spy, right?"

"We are," Shiro said slowly. "Why...? Do you know something?"

Wyn opened his mouth, but for a long while no sound came out. "I... No, I..." He screwed his eyes shut, his hands balling into fists at the collar of his jacket. "I think it's me."

A jolt of cold shot through Matt's chest. It struck him that he'd never considered Wyn as the source of the leak. Not that he thought for one second that Wyn would betray them, but he'd been Haggar's prisoner for months. She'd experimented on him, and no one really knew what that meant. She'd put an override in Shiro's arm, she'd sent Matt back to Earth as part of Project Balmera, all the while letting him think he'd escaped. Why couldn't she spy on Voltron through Wyn?

Almost as quickly as the thought formed, it started to crumble. There was certainly opportunity for Haggar to have done something to Wyn, and Coran taking Wyn under his wing meant that he saw more than an average civilian on the castle-ship, but it wasn't as though they let Wyn sit in on all their strategy meetings. Especially in this most recent case, Wyn just didn't make sense as a suspect. How would he have found out about the Black Lion's entry point in the skies above the Galra homeworld?

It was clear Shiro had come to a similar conclusion, for he leaned forward, resting a hand on Wyn's arm. "You think you're the spy?" he asked, so gently Wyn looked up. He must have been expecting a different reaction, and his mouth hung open for a long moment. Shiro rubbed his arm. "Why do you think that?"

"Because--" Wyn's mouth snapped shut, and his eyes narrowed an instant before he pulled back, out of Shiro's reach, his face carefully blank. "Haggar. She... I don't know what she did, but she did something to me."

He left it at that, and Shiro's smile turned sad. "I know how scary that is--knowing Haggar did something that might be putting other people in danger." Shiro waited until Wyn looked up at him, then nodded. "Even if you're right, none of this is your fault. And you can trust me when I say that because I've been there, too."

Wyn's breath caught, and his face crumpled. A complicated mix of emotions washed across his features, making Matt's chest tighten in sympathy.

"For what it's worth, I don't think you have anything to worry about. Coran looked you over when we first got you out, didn't he? I'm sure he would have found signs of Haggar's tricks if there were any. But if it would help you feel better, we could have him look again?"

Wyn shrugged, staring at his hands and giving no other response. Shiro glanced helplessly at Matt, who only shook his head. It didn't look as though Shiro's words had done much to alleviate Wyn's unease, but Matt was at a loss for how else to help. What, was he waiting for them to turn on him?

"Wyn," Shiro began, but just then, there was another knock at the door. Shiro seemed perfectly content to ignore it, but Wyn was out of his chair in an instant, his head down as he hurried toward the door.

"Sorry," he said. "I'll go see Coran. You have more important things to do."

He left before Shiro had a chance to argue, and the new arrival cautiously stepped into the room. "Sorry," she said. "Is this a bad time?"

She was a Guardsmen--one of the newer recruits, Matt thought. He didn't know their species by name, but he'd seen them around: reptilian people with vibrant green eyes and a long tail. This one's was quivering violently as she stepped forward, wringing her hands.

Shiro stared after Wyn for a long moment before sighing and standing, gesturing to the chair he'd just vacated. "You're fine. Please, sit." Shiro circled back to the other side of the desk and sat, pulling Matt down beside him. "What did you want to talk about?"

Matt sat, grudgingly, and tried not to let his irritation show on his face. He was worried about Wyn--more now than when he'd named himself as a suspect--and if this turned out to be another waste of time, he really was going to snap.

The Guardsman folded her hands in her lap, claws picking at a scale. "Yeah, I--I don’t know. It's probably nothing. I'm sorry."

As she started to stand, Shiro reached his hand across the table, smiling far more patiently than Matt could have managed. "Wait. Please. If you have concerns, please tell us. This is what we're here for." He waited, still smiling that diplomatic smile of his, until she looked up. "Now, what's wrong?"

Matt hardly listened to her story--something about another squad that seemed to have incredible luck, even in battles that had taken a sharp turn for the worst. They weren't Galra this time, at least, but it was also at least the fifteenth report of a different squad that had suffered no major injuries or death in the war. That was just the way it went. Some people got lucky. They got better assignments, or they had more experience, or they happened to be on the opposite side of a battle from the worst of the fighting.

"Like I said, it's nothing." The woman--Klernchett--stood hastily when she'd finished her story. "Sorry. I know the Lady Paladin said we should come forward with any concerns, no matter how small, but--" She shook her head, even more agitated than when she'd come in.

Shiro, though, looked truly interested for the first time since she'd appeared in the doorway. "Lady Paladin?" he asked, a subtle edge to his voice. "You mean Allura?"

Klernchett stopped just inside the door, frowning. "No," she said. "I mean--Yes, she did say we should feel free to take advantage of the tip lines and all that, but-- No. I meant Paladin Lealle. She;s the one who told me to speak with you."

* * *

The Red Lion grumbled all around Akira as he brought her in for a landing in the industrial sector that had become her home this last week. He winced as her back leg clipped the building behind them--unoccupied, thankfully, but that was no reason to go on a one-man demolition spree. Red growled--legitimately growled--and Akira wrinkled his nose.

"Yeah, well, you're not being much help here, sweetheart," he muttered. It had been a long day, despite the fact that he was mostly flying circuits around the city to scare the Imperials and rally the citizens. He'd circled out to some of the other city-domes nearby, shooting down a few of the bigger Imperial structures (when he could find one that wasn't in the middle of inhabited land.)

And he'd thought his mad scramble to reach Keith and Lance had been ugly. At least then he'd had Red actively helping him, and her nudges, combined with his training, had brought him through mostly unscratched.

Now, however, Red was silent except for the constant rumbles of discontent. She was pouting, plain and simple, and Akira knew it. He wasn't Keith, and Keith wasn't dying, and that meant Akira didn't belong here. He couldn't blame her for being so stubborn, but it was still _damn_ annoying.

"There," he said, lifting his hands away from the controls as soon as Red was firmly on solid ground. "I'm done. And I'm sure Keith will be back on his feet in another day or two, so you won't have to put up with me again. Okay?"

Red said nothing--not that she'd ever exactly spoken to him, but he could usually get a sense of her temperament from the way her engines spun down or the creak of cooling metal. Not now. She was silent, eerily so, and Akira felt her watching him as he headed down the ramp and across the courtyard to the building Mirek's team had taken over to act as a field base. As her shield descended between them, he swore he felt something like an apology from her, but it was gone as quickly as it had come, leaving him to stare over his shoulder at her in confusion.

Arel looked up from his computers as Akira walked in. "Nice landing," he said dryly.

Akira groaned and draped himself across the desk. "Hey, don't look at me. I'm a cargo pilot. You know what that means? It means I know how to handle big, clunky ships with no maneuverability. What I _don't_ know how to handle are big, clunky ships with a grudge against me for the simple fact of not being Keith."

Arel smothered a laugh, though he didn't lift his eyes away from his screen. "Yeah, well, Keith seems to have a lot of fans these days."

"And whose fault is that, hmm?"

Akira grinned as Arel's ears flattened back against his scalp. He looked away from whatever it was on his computer that was so fascinating and bared his teeth at Akira--not half so intimidating coming from him as from Keith. And Keith wasn't all that intimidating to begin with.

"I'm just saying," Akira said, taking pity on the kid, who clearly didn't know how to defend himself. "You're the one who's been doing all that PR stuff. Making Keith look like a hero."

"He makes himself look like a hero," Arel said. "That's why he almost died."

"Uh-huh." Akira glanced to the far side of the room, where a screen was pulled up, showing the public broadcast. Vit had regained control a few times over the last week, but thanks to Thace's backdoor access, it never lasted long. For the first few days, Arel had just played clips from the run on the Kral Mestna on endless loop. It had freaked Akira out to no end, even without showing the explosion or Keith’s limp body. Neither Keith nor Lance had looked good once the action got going.

They'd looked desperate. Underdogs fighting back against the Empire that was crushing the whole homeworld underfoot. Outmatched, but unwilling to surrender. Ordinary people taking on the Empire itself and living to fight another day. According to Arel, the homeworld didn't need saviors they could count on to win the day; they just needed to know that they weren't fighting alone.

Well, Keith was doing better now, and Arel had moved on to clips of more recent battles--the clash at the protest during which Lance had taken out a complement of tanks, an ambush that had netted Mirek three armored transports and a handful of guns. Lance featured heavily in these clips--he was still a paladin, after all, which meant he was still the best inspiration they had. He'd done a few interviews, as had Akira.

Apparently, Arel had wanted to interview Keith, too, but Keith had flatly refused. So Arel had just reused the old footage and interviewed other people about him.

"I caught your interview the other day," Akira said, off-hand but unable to tamp down on his smile. "Seems like you had nothing bad to say about him."

Arel scowled. "I told the truth, plain and simple. Keith saved my life. He's helped to save other lives-- _Galra_ lives. Not many people out there are capable of seeing us as victims and not just villains. If we're going to stir up the populace, they need to hear these kind of things. I'm not going to sabotage our efforts here just because I don't like the guy."

Akira hummed, leaning back on his hands. "Well, whatever. You're secret's safe with me."

"Secret?" Arel spluttered. "What secret?"

"That you kinda sorta think Keith is an all right guy."

"I do not."

"You haven't called him Vorsek once since I walked in here," Akira pointed out. Arel's mouth snapped shut, and Akira couldn't help but laugh. "Hey, like I said. I'm not gonna spill the beans on you. Bigger things to worry about, you know? I'm just glad you're not out for blood anymore. Like, I get it. I do. But he's also basically my brother. You can't blame me for wanting him to make friends."

The fur along Arel's arms was standing on end, a curious sight when it was so short and fine--halfway between goosebumps and a cat puffing up. It slowly laid down again as Arel watched Akira, apparently waiting for a trick. When it didn't come, he huffed.

"I don't know that we'll ever be friends," he said. "But… I don't want him to die. We need him too much for that."

Smiling, Akira patted Arel's shoulder. "Sure. Anyway, it's been a long day. I should go check in with the boss lady and make sure she doesn't need anything else from me before I turn in for the night. Don't overwork yourself!"

Arel said nothing, but his eyes followed Akira until he was out the door.

* * *

It took an eternity to search the Jessaranti Asteroid Belt. An endless litany of slow sweeps--cautious at first, hiding behind asteroids and scanning ahead. Pidge kept expecting to find something--the base Meri had told them about, obviously, but more than that. If this was where the Empire was holding their dad--someone Haggar _had_ to realize by now was a valuable hostage to leverage against the paladins--there should have been more security than this. Patrols, satellites, something.

Instead, for two long days, they found nothing at all.

The asteroids were scattered across a massive swath of space, sometimes scattered so far apart Green could hardly detect the next one on her scanners.

The search was painfully slow, and that was only exacerbated by the fact that they kept having to wait for the cloak to recharge. They would forge ahead for just under three hours, find somewhere to hide, and run scans for two hours while Green soaked in the power of the distant sun. Then, once the cloak was ready to go, they'd start all over again.

They’d dialed back the cloak after their first cursory pass turned up nothing, but by the end of the second day, halfway through their second circuit, Pidge had unilaterally decided to forgo it altogether.

"If there was anyone out here, we'd have seen signs of it by now," they told Ryner, their back itching with the need to justify their decision. Yes, they were in a hurry. Yes, it was maddening to sit around waiting for the cloak to recharge. But they weren't being irresponsible.

They'd sent an update back to the castle the night before, short and to-the-point. _Nothing yet. Still looking._ They didn't say that it would have gone faster with the other paladins here; the team was stretched too thin to pool all their resources in one place, especially since whatever time they might have saved would have been balanced out by an increased risk. One lion might go undetected--might, at least, be dismissed as a fluke if they were spotted. Four lions, not so much. And considering it was Pidge's dad who was in danger if this went wrong, Pidge wasn't sure the trade-off was worth it.

It seemed there was nothing here to find, though. Green’s scanners were powerful enough that they would have picked up anything on that first pass. Pidge had pushed for a more thorough sweep first because there was a very real possibility that Haggar had developed some sort of cloaking technology that could foil their scanners. She obviously had some idea what kinds of capabilities they had, seeing as she'd staged the Renxora lab specifically to fool the BLIP-tech. From there, it probably wouldn't be too hard to develop some kind of shielding.

So they'd started a visual sweep, running supplemental scans as they went. Haggar couldn't have thought of everything, and even if she had, there would be a lapse in security somewhere. Pidge just had to find it.

As the second day of searching came to a close, however, even Pidge's stubborn optimism began to wane.

"They've already cleared out, haven't they?" they asked Ryner, bringing Green in for a landing on an asteroid indistinguishable from any of the other million they'd seen today. They'd had just about enough of barren stone and long patches of darkness in between, and as Green rumbled in contentment as she settled in for the night, Pidge slumped back in their seat. "I don't know which would be more disappointing--if they ran as soon as they found out we were here, or if Meri's intel was outdated from the start."

Ryner laid a hand on their arm and offered a sympathetic smile. "Do you want to head back? You and Val have been making progress on the bilocation research, haven't you?"

"Sort of..." Pidge flicked a switch on the console back and forth, toggling between two status displays. "Let's give it one more day. At least finish this circuit. There might still be a base here, even if the Empire's abandoned it. Maybe we can find more information, at least. Something about what they're doing to him, or where they transferred him after this."

Ryner gave their arm a squeeze. "All right. I'll let the others know."

Pidge smiled, leaving Ryner at the controls while they retreated into the cargo bay, where the two of them had set up more comfortable sleeping quarters. Their searches had kept them out of the castle on more than one occasion. _Pidge_ had kept them out of the castle, sometimes. Part of that was paranoia; they didn't want Haggar to know how much they knew about their dad. But part of it was just that it was hard to face their mother and brother every day when they'd made no substantial progress toward locating their dad.

Even as they settled in on their cot for the night, they automatically started going back over everything they knew--every scrap of information they'd compiled about their dad, about Vindication, about Haggar and her druids. They'd ruled out a fair number of labs, but there were infinitely more they didn't even know about, infinitely more systems and planets and ships waiting out there in the universe, undiscovered. They could search for a million lifetimes and not find the right prison by process of elimination.

They needed a better lead.

Their mind was still spinning circles when Ryner joined them in the cargo bay, but Pidge feigned sleep, unwilling to face more sympathy and reassurance. They waited, face turned to the wall, until Ryner's breathing evened out. Their own mind was still wide awake and restless, worry for their dad turning their stomach to a seething mass of unease.

With a sigh, they slipped out of bed and headed back up to the cockpit, ignoring Green's sleepy surprise. Sleep wasn't happening anytime soon; they might as well try to get some more work done.

* * *

"This is going to take forever," Hunk said, aiming for neutrality but falling somewhere closer to exasperation.

Shay smiled, her own attempt at optimism falling flat. "All the more reason to get started."

Hunk grimaced, double-checking the course he'd plotted for them. The lions were fast, and Yellow's scanners reached far enough that they could take the course as a series of wormholes, skipping across the theorized Paths like a stone across the surface of a lake. It would save them a lot of time, but a Migration was still massive on a mind-boggling scale. It took Balmera years and years to make one circuit. He'd heard several different estimates for the exact time frame, some as short as fifty years, some as long as two millennia. (Those ones were generally agreed to be hyperbole, but the stories that had survived did suggest that the average Balmeran would not live to see a second Migration.)

Even at their fastest, it would still take months to cover every inch of the course Eida had provided them. That was why they were taking a gamble. The destruction at the last feeding ground had been recent--within a year, by Shay's estimate. More recent still, if Hunk’s suspicions were correct. Hunk didn't know if Balmera on the same Paths staggered themselves at all, or if they all traveled together. There might be several small packs following the same Paths at different times.

They were running off the assumption that that was not the case, and that instead the Balmera all traveled together. They were assuming, also, that some of them had survived the purported Vkullor attack and fled--but had stayed on their familiar Paths rather than strike out into unknown space.

Based on that understanding, they were starting from the last point they had from the caves that had been uncovered on Atsiphos and Theros and continuing on from there. They could cover in a week what a Balmera could cover in a year--it still wasn't ideal, of course, but it was a start.

That was the most important thing: to _start_.

"Okay," Hunk said. "Here we go."

* * *

They traveled for eight hours that day, pausing between wormholes to run scans and follow the Path for a short distance. Here and there, they ventured off the course to check out alternate Paths Eida had marked for them.

They found nothing. No dead Balmera, no trails they might follow, no signs of life on the scanners except for the occasional inhabited world. It was nerve-wracking, following a course that had been plotted second-hand from salvaged information that might not even be accurate. But Ryner trusted Eida, and Hunk respected the Olkari's scholarly abilities, and anyway, what choice did they have?

They got more efficient as they went, cutting the interval between wormholes nearly in half by the end of the first day. They slept in the diffuse light of a nearby nebula and woke early, unrested but still eager to get moving for the day.

Two hours later, they'd found them.

Even just on the other side of the wormhole, there was nothing. No shadows on the scanners, no trails of waste or Quintessence. Only stars that looked, to Hunk, no different from any other. Eida insisted that she'd followed the optimal energy sources across the universe to plot the Migration, but Hunk had honestly been a little bit skeptical.

Until they came out of another wormhole--probably their fortieth or fiftieth in the last two days--and saw them there on the scanners: six little dots glowing with concentrated Quintessence. Other biomarkers showed up as they drew closer, and Shay's breath actually hitched at once point when the BLIP-tech confirmed Balmeran and Balmera bio-signatures at the indicated points on the map.

"Oh my god," Hunk whispered. "That's-- Holy crap. I'm not imagining this, am I?"

Shay had a hand pressed to her mouth, her song a swirl of hope and disbelief. She said nothing, only shook her head. Yellow took them closer, every bit as awed as her pilots. Here were Balmerans--real Balmerans, alive and free. They'd been searching for so long that Hunk had almost begun to think that they'd never find anything.

And now here they were.

"So, what? Do we just fly down there?" Hunk asked as they approached. The Balmera were now more than blips on a scanner; he could see them in the distance. Six Balmera, one with a horrendous gash across her surface, the largest big enough that the smallest looked like a moon in orbit. A young Balmera, maybe? Or maybe Zarkon had selectively taken Balmera of middling size. He might have seen little use in the smallest of them, and the largest may have fared better at defending against his attacks.

Shay took a moment to breathe, and even so her voice was thick with tears when she finally found it. "I know not. Perhaps we should attempt to hail them?"

Hunk nodded and pulled up the comms panel. He broadcast a standard greeting on all frequencies, and while he waited for a reply, he scanned for local comms activity. "Nothing," he said after a moment. "Maybe they don't use comms?"

Shay frowned. "They must communicate somehow. Perhaps they are waiting to see what we will do?"

Unease gathered at the base of Hunk's spine. "Maybe..." He trailed off, unable to put into words what it was that was bothering him. Something was wrong, or something was about to go wrong, or...

He just didn't know enough. So they closed in, Hunk's paranoia infecting the other two and slowing their pace to a crawl. That made Hunk feel guilty on top of feeling nervous, and he tried to shake it off. These were Balmerans. The BLIP-tech confirmed that they were alive, and there were no Galra biosignatures in sight. There was nothing to worry about.

Nothing expect for the oppressive sense of being watched as they wound their way between the Balmera. None of them knew which to head for first. There was no obvious leader, nothing to suggest that one would be more welcoming than the rest. Shay chose one more or less at random--neither the largest nor the smallest, the most densely populated nor the least, and not the one with the wound in its surface.

Something hit them from behind--a force that burst into the song and momentarily blinded all three of them. Hunk didn't see anything there in the brief moment he had to react before his vision whited out. They spun, or at least Hunk thought they were spinning. Yellow was as blind as him, blind to her own systems even. She roared in a panic that closed around Hunk's throat and around his chest, squeezing the air from his lungs.

He blinked to clear his vision, but only managed to see a fleeting flash of glittering crystal and luminous plants before they impacted, Hunk and Shay crying out as they were thrown against their restraints.

"What was that?" Hunk asked, shaking as his head finally cleared. They sat on an angle, the view through Yellow's viewscreen showing a lush field with crystal formations poking up through the foliage.

Shay pressed a hand to her head, the pounding of her heart fluttering in the song.

The song.

Hunk hadn't heard it at first, through the confusion of the whatever-it-was that had hit them and the resulting crash. But now, suddenly, it was all around: an unfamiliar song, louder and more chaotic than any he'd heard before. It pressed at his mind, at his soul, suffocating, and he responded without thinking with a note of distress.

Shock silenced the song for a moment, and Hunk looked up to find half a dozen Balmerans staring back at him through Yellow's viewscreen.

They wore crystalline armor of a style Hunk had never seen before, carried swords and bows that glowed with the blue glimmer of Quintessence. Their eyes were wide, their guards dropping minutely at they stared at the Yellow Lion. They couldn't see inside, of course, but there was something in the song, as it started up again, that spoke to old knowledge and deep respect.

It was only a moment before the song became too much again. Hunk thought it was the sheer number of voices conversing, at least in part--too many for him to focus or pick apart the harmonies. But it was more than that. It was the quality of the song. There was depth and complexity to this song that Hunk simply didn't know how to untangle, and his mind kept running up against walls.

Shay closed her eyes and sang, a plea for quiet, for parlay. Her song struck a discordant note in the song, as it had when she first joined the songs of Metos and Atsiphos.

The local song urged them to come out, if they truly meant peace. There was suspicion behind the request, and something smooth and blank, like a hole in the song. It felt to Hunk like something was being withheld from him, but he couldn't begin to guess what.

"We should go," Shay said slowly. She was as thrown by the new song as Hunk, but her joy had not dimmed for the psychic onslaught. "We should speak with them."

They emerged, and Hunk touched his hand to the small of Shay's back, willing her to sense his encouragement through the bond. She smiled at him, then stepped forward to greet a Balmera who seemed to be the leader of the force--an individual with a crested helmet and veins of blue on their face--perhaps Quintessence, perhaps luminous paint.

"Pax," Shay said, her voice steady and clear. This was the voice she used when acting as Elder: more confident than Shay the youngling who Hunk knew still didn't feel as though she should be welcome among the leaders of her people. "I am Elder Shay, of Theros. This, my heart-mate Hunk. We are paladins of Voltron, and we wish to speak to you and your Elders."

The song picked up, dancing just on the verge of hearing. It was like standing in front of the speakers at a concert, the sound almost physically painful as it resounded in his chest. At the same time, though, some lines of it wavered on the very edge of hearing, like voices whispering in his ear. There were questions in those voices, and Hunk could pick out a few of them well enough. The Balmerans wanted to know who they were, why they were here. Why they sang the song so poorly.

Shay's confidence wavered as seconds ticked by without a response. She glanced to Hunk, and the worry in her eyes told him she'd noticed something in the song that flew over his head.

"Can you understand me?" she asked the Balmerans.

They didn't answer.

Hunk cast his mind toward Yellow, toward the universal translator she carried in her systems. All he got in return was confusion. There was only one Balmeran language in her database, and it was the same one Shay had just spoken. If these Balmerans used another language, then Yellow had no way to translate it, or to translate Hunk and Shay's words into the local tongue.

"It is well," Shay said aloud, though Hunk wasn't sure who she was speaking to. Taking a deep breath, she condensed the idea of the Elders into the song and projected it to the watchful Balmerans. They frowned, their song turning quizzical, but their leader nodded and gave a sharp gesture. The others closed in around Hunk and Shay, escorting them toward the mouth of a tunnel in the distance.

* * *

It was time. Weeks of planning, of watching. Weeks spent cozying up to Haggar and the other druids in order to learn their schedules and their habits. Weeks of watching prisoners be tortured, standing by, actively helping. Meri couldn't take it any more.

Galvanized by her success with Varrok's credentials, she'd stepped up her timeline. Originally, she'd wanted to be more sure of things before she made a move against Haggar directly, but that just wasn't going to happen. Maybe she was rushing this. Maybe she should be taking more precautions.

But if she delayed even another week, she was going to snap and blow her cover anyway. It was time to get what she'd come here for, and then get the hell out.

She lingered after the group demonstration, pointedly ignoring the way Elhete stared at her for a long moment as the others filed out. Meri almost thought she was going to stay, just to find out what her rival was up to, but she finally gave in and left, silence descending in her wake.

"Did you need something?" Haggar asked, not looking up from the assortment of tools and scanners she'd used during the day's demonstration. Meri was still queasy from the experience, even though it had been tame by Haggar's standards--nothing permanently scarring, nothing even particularly painful. Just a little bit of magical interference with perception. Hallucinations, in short, controlled entirely by the caster and invisible to all but the intended target. Haggar had walked them through it in such excruciating detail Meri thought she might have been able to do it herself.

"Yes, Lady Haggar," Meri said, locking her discomfort away behind the mask of Reza ve Orahk. She stood stiff and straight, her hands loose at her side, her eyes staring straight ahead even as Haggar turned, one eyebrow arching delicately as she studied Meri.

Haggar waited a few seconds longer, impassive as a sentry. Her gaze, as always, made Meri want to squirm, like she was a trainee under the old paladins again, trying her very best to live up to the station she hoped one day to possess--and trying equally hard not to let on that she'd spent the morning sneaking around swapping location codes on all the castle’s navigational aids so signs pointing toward the kitchens now led visitors to the pool.

"Well?" Haggar asked at length. "What is it you want?"

Meri raised her chin, finally meeting Haggar's gaze directly--unwaveringly. "An opportunity. I'm better than all this waiting around and only testing myself on the most pitiful of targets. I know the theory, I've proved myself capable of carrying it out--let me try myself on something worthy of my skill."

Haggar scoffed, turning away. "You have been here a matter of movements. You are still a child among druids."

"I came from the front lines!" Reza's fury came easily to the forefront, venting the anger and frustration Meri had been forced to keep under wraps since arriving on the _Eryth_. "The other students might be ignorant children who cannot fend for themselves, but I am not the same. I can do this. Surely there's one resistant prisoner on this ship you don't need anymore. Let me pick them apart. Let me _try_."

Haggar turned her head, her eyes narrowing to luminous slits as she considered the request. "Why should I? Why accelerate your studies and no one else's?"

Meri held her tongue for a moment, wondering if she was pushing too hard too fast. She had to, though. She couldn't stay here. "I've seen the way you watch me. I've heard the others talking, too. You don't give them private lessons, only me. Why, if not because you see something in me you don't see in any of them?"

The corner of Haggar's mouth quirked upward, something almost like amusement creeping into her voice. "Perhaps I do." She set the last of her instruments back into its proper place in the kit, then slotted it into an alcove on the wall, where it was pulled out of sight for storage until Haggar called for it again. "You're right, Reza. You aren't like the others. I don't know if you're ready for the next step in your training, but if you're that eager to move ahead..."

"I am." Meri squared her shoulders, refusing to show her disgust. _Soon._ She would be out of here soon.

Haggar waved a hand absently. "Very well." She crossed to the computer terminal along the back wall, and Meri's heart began to race. She breathed, straining for calm. For relative calm, at least. Something she could pass off as anticipation for the opportunity Haggar was about to give her, and not the chance of a lifetime--the chance to get an ally inside Vindication and get herself back home.

She watched, breathless, as Haggar entered her credentials. For weeks now, Meri had been analyzing her voice, picking out the little quirks that made it unique, the subtle twists and hitches that would make a mediocre imitation indistinguishable. She'd had little time to actually practice her imitation--she still had to be careful about who might be watching or listening to her at any given moment. But in the shower, on her infrequent flights out in her private shuttle, in the engine bay where the rumble of machinery drowned out a whisper, she'd been practicing.

Her imitation wasn't perfect, but it was nearly so. Haggar's voice was like an old friend by now. Meri knew it inside and out. Sometimes she thought she would be hearing it until the day she died. The only thing she'd been missing was they key phrase Haggar used to access the network. The computer was always signed in by the time Meri arrived to lessons; even arriving early had done her no favors, and she could only push that so far before someone started to get suspicious. On the rare occasion that Haggar arrived late to a lesson and needed the computers, she would order one of her pupils to log on.

She'd already logged off today, though, and Meri had gambled that she would need to pull up the prisoner records before she could give a definite answer to Meri's request.

That gamble had paid off, and Meri recited the code phrase inside her head, branding the cadence and inflection into her memory as Haggar named a time for Meri to come and test herself against one of the more resilient prisoners.

That didn't matter now. Meri had what she needed. Tonight, she would sneak down to the archives, log on to Haggar's private account, and reassign Ulaz to Vindication. Then...

Then she'd have to improvise. She'd cover her tracks, one way or another--digitally, magically... Somehow.

She was ready to go home.

* * *

It was four hours into the third day of searching, and Pidge was nodding off at the controls. They'd hardly gotten any sleep last night, and the endless monotony of the asteroid belt lulled them into a haze. Green was running all her usual scans and then some, Ryner was helping Green look over the results, and Pidge was supposed to be watching for structures on the surface of the asteroids.

They were so tired that they only recognized the base as out of place after they'd been staring at it for a full thirty seconds.

"Holy shit," they breathed, once their brain finally kicked back into gear. "Ryner! Ryner, look!"

Ryner looked up, then let out a short, sharp breath. "Would you look at that..." She turned, skimming the scan results Green had already pulled up for her. "It would seem its been abandoned for several days, at least. No measurable levels of Quintessence, no residual heat or energy use, no communications in the area. More gravity than there should be on an asteroid of that size, though."

Pidge frowned. "What, like they forgot to shut down the grav generators? Wouldn't that take energy?"

"The readings aren't high enough for gravity generators," Ryner said. "Possibly it's something about the construction of the building, or perhaps an anomaly in the asteroid. That could be why they chose this location in particular."

"Or it could be another trap," Pidge said. "Maybe they're masking their presence, but their calculations were off by a little bit for the gravity readings."

"Maybe." Ryner sat back in her seat. "I suppose you want to go in anyway."

Pidge grinned, already undoing their flight harness, sealing their helmet, and heading for the ramp. They summoned their bayard as they went, heart in their throat. Everything felt like a contradiction right now--even just ten minutes ago, they'd been sure that the base, if it even existed, was abandoned. Now they were ready for a full complement of Imperial soldiers to come charging out, and at the same time they could hardly restrain the part of them that strained to go charging in, shouting for their dad at every turn.

They held back, trying to be rational about this, and waited for Ryner to join them at the bottom of the ramp before they started forward, creeping across the ice-encrusted rock of the asteroid toward the base. It was a low, sprawling structure--a handful of domes forming a semicircle around the central structure. Each of the domes was connected to the hub by a long, narrow tunnel, but none of the outlying structures had an entrance Pidge could see from here.

It looked… It looked like the lab they’d once infiltrated on Maorel. The domes, at least, were the same. But… that couldn’t be right. The Maorel lab was…

It had to be a coincidence.

They headed instead for the hub, sending Rover ahead to hack into the airlock controls to let them in. The base was still pressurized, it seemed, and there was some level of residual power. Enough, at least, to run the airlock once. Ryner had been right in her assessment of the gravity, though. Pidge moved inside the base as they had outside: with a bounding gait reminiscent of old recordings of the first moon landing. They could stand in place, but they felt always on the verge of drifting off, and even the lightest push was enough to get them airborne.

It was a bizarre sensation, and they engaged the magnetic mode on their boots to lock them to the floor. It was slower, and they still had to steady themself on walls and doors every so often, the low gravity screwing with their sense of balance. At least they weren't bouncing all over the place.

The base itself was dark and cold, Pidge's headlamp illuminating endless corridors that curved slowly out of sight. They cut through doors and forced their way into offices, computer rooms, labs, and storage spaces. There wasn't much dust to be found, either in the air or gathered on flat surfaces, which meant either these people had an incredibly efficient air filtration system or they hadn't been gone long.

"It's empty," Ryner said, after they found the third laboratory, this one full of smashed equipment, like either a bomb or a Ziva had been turned loose inside. "I think it's safe to say that at this point."

Pidge nodded slowly, the destruction captivating them for a long moment before they were able to turn away. "Let's see if we can power up one of these computers. See if there's anything left on them."

There was a whole back half of the hub left to explore, not to mention the outlying domes, but Pidge was already feeling uneasy here. The long shadows, the oppressive silence... They didn't want to see what other horrors this base was hiding. They just wanted to know what had happened to their dad.

They backtracked toward one of the computer labs, but a flare of concern from Green stopped them in their tracks. Pidge shot a frantic look toward Ryner, remembering what had happened the last time they'd come to a base their dad had been held at and found it abandoned.

They were already headed back for the entrance at a jog, even as they focused their mind inward toward the bond, trying to coax more details out of Green. She sent them vague images, overlaid by familiar scents and the oppressive sense of another presence in the cockpit.

Dark Green, and its pilot.

Pidge picked up the pace, cursing under their breath as they retraced lonely hallways, Ryner on their heels. Green was waiting at the entrance to the lab, scooping her paladins up as soon as they emerged. Pidge threw themself into the pilot seat and turned Green around, powering up the shields and weapons before Dark Green thought to take advantage of their distraction.

But the false lion wasn't attacking yet. They could see it in the distance: a flicker of magenta and lime green on a shell that otherwise blended into the night sky. It approached on a lazy, meandering path, as though it were waiting for Pidge and Ryner.

"What the hell?" Pidge muttered. "Since when does Haggar teach her robeasts manners?"

"Be careful," Ryner said. Her presence in the bond was one of carefully controlled fear, sharpened into a weapon and held at the ready. This was the creature that had almost killed them, the creature that had come to them ostensibly seeking aid but failing to answer the most pressing questions. On at least one level, this was an enemy, perhaps the most lethal they'd yet faced, and Pidge didn't trust that the pilot within was any less hostile.

And still it didn't attack.

Pidge adjusted their grip on the controls, ready for a fight. They urged Green into the air, unwilling to be caught flat-footed this time, and still Dark Green approached with that unhurried air.

The atmosphere inside the cockpit changed, thickened with the arrival of a new presence, and the hairs along the back of Pidge's neck stood on end as Green rumbled in frustration and distrust. The words appeared on the screen an instant later.

 **I'm sorry,** said the pilot of the Dark Green Lion. **I can't stop it.**

In the next instant, the false Lion attacked.


	42. The Eve of Battle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Pidge and Ryner are in the Jessaranti Asteroid Belt, where they found an abandoned Imperial lab and were attacked by Dark Green. Hunk and Shay have at last located free Balmera. After crash-landing on one of them, they encountered the local Balmerans, but the language barrier is making communication difficult. The fight on the Galra homeworld is proceeding, even without help from Voltron, and Keith is back on his feet once more and ready to get back in the action. Meanwhile, Shiro, Matt, and Allura continue to investigate the spy on the castle-ship. Wyn came forward to name himself as a suspect, and Matt and Shiro discovered that Lealle has been telling Guardsmen to come forward with petty grievances. Having successfully gained access to one druid's account, Meri has decided it's time to make her move. She has Haggar's credentials and is planning to go digging for information and a way into Vindication tonight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warnings: Overall intense emotions and high stakes. Some discussion of grief during Allura's POV section, and something bordering on a panic attack during Karen's section, but neither is extraordinarily intense.

Dark Green was stronger than Pidge remembered. Stronger, faster, and more ruthless. It chased them across the Jessaranti Asteroid Belt, hounding them with lasers, putting on bursts of speed to cut them off or headbutt them into--and through--nearby asteroids. Pidge couldn’t anticipate its movements, to say nothing of its weapons. It had everything Pidge had discovered or built into Green and then some.

They rolled with the force of Dark Green's latest hit, twisting so they were facing back toward their opponent, and Ryner let loose with the main canon. Dark Green turned, caught the attack on its shield. The design of it was different than Green's, more Imperial in aesthetic, sharper around the edges.

It still absorbed the laser like it was nothing. A ripple of violet light washed outward across the surface of the shield as the laser impacted, and then with one final flash, the light winked out.

Cursing, Pidge tucked tail and ran, only barely escaping the range of Dark Green’s LOKI-knockoff. The whine of electricity rang on the edge of hearing, and Green shivered with the close call, but she spun at Pidge’s prompting and unloaded on Dark Green with both lasers at once.

"What the hell is going on with this thing?" Pidge demanded, pulling up sharply as Dark Green retaliated with a laser of its own. "First it tries to kill us, then it wants to make friends with us. Now we're back to killing?"

"I'm still not convinced that parlay wasn't a trick," Ryner said. "And even if it wasn't, we know Haggar has ways of taking control of people."

Pidge's stomach dropped, remembering the shape of the base on Maorel. Remembering the eerie familiarity they'd felt inside the Jessaranti base. How many robeast pilots might have reached out to the paladins, if they’d had the chance? "You mean there might be an innocent person somewhere inside all... that."

Ryner didn't immediately say anything, though her thoughts were plain enough. She did, in fact, think that a prisoner had been consumed in creating this monstrosity. Whether or not that person still existed in any real sense was another matter entirely.

They had to assume there was still someone in there to save, though. They _had_ to at least try.

"We can't worry about that right now," Ryner said.

"Can't--? Ryner, we're the paladins of Voltron! We _exist_ to save the people Haggar and Zarkon crush under the heel of technological advancement. We can't just murder someone because they're in our way!"

"And if the alternative is to die here? Or to escape, but leave Dark Green to terrorize untold millions of other innocent people?"

If Dark Green, or something like it, had come out of the Jessaranti base, then Pidge knew exactly what they would choose, and it wouldn't be the utter destruction of-- (they shied away from the thought that was staring them straight in the face.) They wouldn’t kill someone who’d never asked to be made into a monster, no matter where it had happened, or when. They wouldn't. They couldn't.

Alarm spiked in Ryner's thoughts, sharp and probing. She turned, her eyes leaving the battle for a brief moment to stare at the side of Pidge's head. "Pidge," she whispered. "You don't think...?"

Dark Green appeared in front of them at that moment, moving as fast as Pidge had ever seen a lion move and charging a ball of lightning in its jaw. Pidge seized on the distraction as an excuse to ignore Ryner's question, and they roped her back into focusing on escape-- _escape_ , and not victory. There was more going on here than they realized, and the fact that this place was being watched at all, after it had been so thoroughly abandoned, told Pidge that there were still secrets to unearth within its walls.

They felt it like an itch beneath their skin, calling them back to the lab, to the secrets, to the realizations waiting in stasis for the moment when Pidge could no longer hold them at arm’s length.

They knew Ryner wanted to put an end to Dark Green. They knew she wanted, at least, to withdraw so they could come at it again with a clear head. But Pidge didn’t care. There were answers here, and they weren’t leaving without them.

* * *

When Keith entered the resistance headquarters for the first time in a week, he was greeted by utter silence. He stopped, reaching instinctively for the sword sheathed at the small of his back, and waited for an attack.

Someone whistled, breaking the spell, and all at once everyone swarmed him. They clapped him on the back, reached out to shake his hand, pulled him into loose, one-armed hugs. It wasn't hostile, any of it, but it was entirely too much, and Keith froze, afraid that if he let himself react it would be to shove these people away. He couldn’t afford to alienate them.

Fortunately, Lance and Akira didn't have so many qualms. They blustered in, chasing people off and smacking hands that clung on too long.

"Let him breathe, oh my god," Lance said. His tone was pure exasperation, but it was softened somewhat by his smile and by the fact that he didn't put any real force into his slaps. "Sorry," he told Keith. "Forgot how much they've worked themselves up over this."

"Over what?" Keith asked, thoroughly flustered and now itching all over to boot. He'd been pushing to get back into the action ever since waking up two days ago, but now he wondered if the others hadn't been right to tell him to rest. The likur had done its job well--it had left scars behind, to be sure, but the lingering pain and stiffness he'd had when he woke up was gone by now, and he'd already begun an abbreviated workout in the limited space he had available at the safehouse. There weren't training bots or open areas to run drills, but Akira had trained with him--wrestled him, mostly--last night and early this morning. It wasn’t enough, but it had vented enough of his restless energy to keep him from bursting.

Lance squirmed, scratching the back of his neck. "You know... The fight. The way you took the brunt of that explosion for me?"

"The... Oh, vrekt." Keith covered his face with his hands, hunching his shoulders to ward off the attention of the room at large. "I forgot Arel was recording that." The energy was back now, and full to overflowing. Everyone was still staring at him, and he couldn't turn fast enough to catch all the fleeting looks coming at him from behind. He had the uncomfortable sense they were all trying to get a peek at his new scars.

Lance pulled Keith against him, and Keith let his head drop onto Lance's shoulder. His ears were quivering, the fur along his spine standing on end.

"They all saw that?" he whined, letting Lance's shirt muffle his voice in the hopes that no one would hear.

Lance chuckled, swaying with Keith like they were at a dance, though the only music was the rhythmic chirping of the computers along the back wall. "Most of them, yeah. Arel and Mirek clamped down on the footage pretty quick--cut away as soon as they realized what had happened and haven't broadcast it since. Hasn’t _completely_ stopped people talking about it, but… it’s helped?"

"Sure. Only _half_ the city’s talking about that. Everyone else is more interested in the way I swooped in with Red to save the day." Akira's voice practically oozed satisfaction, and Lance let go of Keith for a moment to shove him.

"Yeah, yeah. We're all very proud of you for crashing the Red Lion into the side of a building."

"Several buildings, from what I hear," Keith said, turning his head just enough to catch Akira's eye. Akira squawked in indignation, but he was grinning too wide to mistake his protest for genuine hurt.

"Anyway," Lance said. "A bunch of people saw the raw footage, and almost everyone else has heard the story by now, especially around here. You're a living legend, babe."

Keith pulled back, wrinkling his nose. "For almost dying?"

"For protecting a comrade, regardless of the cost." Mirek's voice shot through Keith like a jolt from Pidge's bayard, and he straightened, snapping halfway into an Imperial salute before he caught himself and replaced the gesture with a bow like the ones he'd seen Shiro and Akira give allied leaders.

Suddenly, her words processed, and Keith looked up at her. "Wait… what?"

"We here on the homeworld have seen enough of Zarkon's philosophy. 'Victory or death'? That's just a pretty way of saying that anyone who's ‘too weak’ by Zarkon’s standards or unlucky enough to get caught in a bad spot isn't worth saving. 'Victory or death' is the philosophy that's had us all trapped here on a dying world without food and medicine. If we were stronger, we'd find a way out. If we were worthy, we'd join the army and _fight_ our way out." Mirek scoffed, the claws of her left hand trailing up her cybernetic arm. "That philosophy is what tempts people like me into the army. Into _dying_ for a cause we don't even believe in."

"Uh..." Keith looked to Lance, unsure how he was supposed to respond to that. "I’m sorry?"

Mirek breathed, closing her eyes for a long moment as she calmed herself. "I’m sure I don’t need to tell you--a lot of people here didn't trust you. A prince, straight from Zarkon's high command? Even one who had defected. We couldn't be sure that wasn't arranged as part of some grand plan of yours. You’ve changed some minds in working alongside us. Those who have met you, who have seen how hard you fight for us. But _this…_ This is something none of them can ignore. If you were Zarkon's man, you would have left Lance to die. He was weak, so why should you risk your skin to pick up his slack?"

"Lance isn’t weak," Keith snapped, his ears lying back against his head. "And I would never leave him to die."

Mirek smiled, and Lance reached down to take Keith's hand, intertwining their fingers. Slowly, Keith became aware of the eyes on him. The smiles the watching crowd couldn’t quite hide--or didn’t bother to. His face burned, and he fought the urge to hide his face once more in Lance’s shoulder.

"That's exactly what I mean," Mirek said. "We here on homeworld look out for each other. It's what makes us different from the Imperial army. Most people here, they haven't heard much about the paladins of Voltron. Zarkon keeps a lid on news like that, and what little has come through makes you seem like just another Zarkon waiting to happen. Militant conquerors stealing Zarkon's realm away bit by bit. I went along with your plan because we needed something to galvanize the people, and I hoped they would see what I've seen. And they did."

She gestured wide, and Keith ducked his head at the reminder of their audience. They weren't staring as openly now, but here and there he still saw eyes wide and glowing as they tracked his movements. Judging him. _Idolizing_ him. He wanted to tell them to find someone else to be their hero.

"We've edited the footage from inside the Kral Mestna," Mirek said. "We haven't dwelled on your injuries. But we have acknowledged it, and people are responding to it. They're responding to _you_." She clapped him on the shoulder and bent over, her cybernetic eye glowing a sharp red as she looked him in the eye. Keith immediately dropped his gaze. She couldn’t know what it did to him, to hear her talk about him like some sort of hero, like someone the people were rallying around. She couldn’t know that when she smiled at him like that, proud and knowing and just the faintest bit patronizing, he only saw his mother.

He wondered if she would be proud of him now.

"You wanted to inspire people to fight back?” Mirek asked, oblivious to the storm building inside his rib cage. “Congratulations. There's an entire planet out there ready to take back their home. Say the word, and they'll follow you to the end of the universe."

The storm hit, rattling the windows of his composure, and he stepped back. He felt as though he’d stepped out into an icy downpour, his mother's voice ringing in his ears. Wasn’t it easy? Wasn’t it just like she’d said? Here he’d rallied the Galra of the homeworld behind his banner, turned them into his own personal armada to be sent off to die when and where he wished, and he’d hardly had to lift a finger.

How easy it would be to make himself Emperor in Zarkon's place.

"Keith?" Lance squeezed his hand. "You okay?"

Keith sucked in a breath, trying and failing to force a smile. "What? No. I'm--" He faltered as Akira appeared behind him--not touching him, not yet, but hovering close and radiating concern. "I'm not feeling good." Keith cringed as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He knew how Lance and Akira would take them, and he didn’t want them to bundle him away again, to shelter him from the war he’d helped to bring to the homeworld, but it was too late to take it back now.

Lance's face softened, and Keith wanted to tell him not to make that face, not to feel sorry for him. Keith had come here under false pretenses, lied to these people, tricked them. He hadn't wanted to, hadn't _meant_ to, but somehow he'd ended up doing exactly what Keena had wanted of him.

"I told you not to push yourself," Lance said, shaking his head. He smiled at Mirek. "Sorry. Can we pick this up tomorrow?"

"Of course." Mirek clapped Keith's shoulder again, and Keith felt the touch resound through his whole body, shaking his bones, his teeth, his heart. "Rest up. We're in the endgame here. We want everyone to be in top condition before we make our move."

Keith grimaced, grateful beyond words when Lance finally ushered him toward the door, Akira close behind. He didn't know; _neither_ of them knew what Keena had asked of Keith, and he didn't want them to find out--now more than ever. So he walked in silence, and when they made it back to the safehouse a few blocks away, he shut himself in his room, pulled a pillow over his face, and breathed through the weight closing in around his chest.

* * *

"No."

"Allura..."

" _No,_ Shiro." Allura crossed her hands over her chest, tucking them under her arms to hide the way they shook. "I'm not going to stand here and listen to you accuse my mother of--"

Shiro took her hand as her voice broke. "No one's accusing her of anything."

"If anything, she's probably a victim here," Matt added. He'd stayed at the far side of the secure conference room while Shiro came forward to talk to Allura. "I can't imagine she'd be working with Zarkon--but if someone managed to slip an extra bit of code in somewhere? We know Haggar can control people; it can't be that hard for her to manipulate AIs once she has a foothold."

The thought turned Allura's stomach. Haggar, rooting around inside Lealle's head. Turning her against the castle and its inhabitants. Against her own daughter.

It was a very Haggar thing to do, Allura had to admit. That didn't make it any easier to entertain the possibility. "And what are you basing this on?" she demanded. "One person who brought forth a flimsy but well-meant concern about a possible spy says my mother encouraged her to do so. Is that a crime now?"

"It's suspicious," Shiro said, cautious like he knew his words were liable to set Allura off. "The Guard respects Lealle the same way they respect all of the paladins. If she heard this concern, she had to have known it was false. She could have laid it to rest as easily as anyone."

"She's not in charge of the investigation," Allura said.

Shiro held up his hands. "I know," he said. "I know, but we don't have any solid leads right now. It's just..." He hesitated, his pinched expression giving Allura pause.

"It's just what?" she asked, still bristling from a day spent poring over anonymous tips--many of them more frustrated ranting than concrete leads--and from the way Shiro had greeted her at dinner with a somber face and an invitation to speak in private after the meal.

Shiro opened his mouth, but it was Matt who found his words first. "None of this makes sense," he said. "The information that's been leaked isn't general knowledge, but we can't find any proof that the people who had access to it ever had an opportunity to pass it along."

"Pidge already scanned for spyware in the main system, I know," Shiro said. "But the AIs aren't pure data. I trust Pidge's expertise, but if there's anywhere they would have missed something, it would be the memory cores. If Haggar managed to implant something in one of them, would we even be able to tell?"

In all likelihood, they wouldn't. Allura knew this, but she still pushed back against the idea. She'd lost her mother once to this war. To lose her again, like this, was--it wasn't fair.

"We're just going to talk to her," Shiro said. "And we wanted to give you the chance to be there, so you have all the information yourself. If you'd rather not--"

Allura shook her head before he could finish. She didn't want to be there for this interrogation, but if she walked away and Shiro and Matt found confirmation of their suspicions, Allura knew she wouldn't be able to accept it. Not out of a lack of faith in her fellow paladins, but simply because she didn't want to believe ill of her mother.

She hadn't wanted to believe ill of her father, either, until she’d seen the truth for herself.

"Are we doing this now?" she asked.

"If you're all right with that." Shiro released her hand and clasped her shoulder instead, and when she didn't shrug him off, he pulled her into an embrace. "I know this is hard."

For a fleeting moment, Allura remained rigid in Shiro's arms. That was her royal training, she supposed. Never let them see weakness. But this was Shiro, and he'd seen her through far worse than this. She relaxed, winding her arms around his waist, and breathed deeply a few times before nodding.

"It is," she said. "Which is all the more reason to get it over with now."

It took her another moment to gather herself enough to pull away from Shiro, but Shiro stayed blessedly quiet in the interim. It wasn’t a platitude when he said he knew how hard this was for her; they were of one mind in more ways than one, and he would be hoping for Lealle's innocence in the same way Allura was hoping for Sam Holt's safe return. Just because she'd never met the man didn't mean she didn't care about him.

Eventually, she found her center, and she nodded to Shiro. Matt joined them at the door, offering Allura a sympathetic smile as they headed back toward the heart of the castle. They claimed a conference room, closed the door, and then Shiro cleared his throat.

"Lealle?"

Her hologram resolved in the center of the room at once. She looked frazzled, which was an odd thing to think about an AI. It didn't show in rumpled clothing or flyaway hairs--the hologram always defaulted to an idealized version of the one it depicted. But there was strain around Lealle's eyes, and her form blurred at the edges, like the hologram wanted to dispel itself.

"Hello, Shiro," she said. "Matt. Allura." Her eyes softened when they fell on Allura, and Allura's heart gave a painful lurch in her chest. It had been nearly a year since she'd woken from stasis, several weeks before that between her mother's death and her father shutting her away in the cryopod.

More than a year, and Allura still couldn't look at her mother without the loss flooding back in.

"Sorry to bother you so late," Shiro said, his words stilted like he knew how absurd it was to be apologizing for disturbing an AI. "You've heard about the spy in the Guard?"

Lealle's face crumpled. "I have. You're sure there's a spy? I've been hoping somehow this was all a big misunderstanding."

Shiro glanced to Allura. "That's what we're trying to figure out. We've heard that some people have been coming to you with their concerns. Is that true?"

"I've been spending more time with the Guard lately, sure." Lealle spread her arms, one side of her mouth lifting in a smile. It was a painfully familiar gesture, and it took Allura back to her younger days, when her mother was always getting into one sort of trouble or another, usually with Coran or Sa or the trainees. The illusion faltered, however, as Lealle's flippancy wore off. "Things are bad, Shiro. I'm sure you can feel it."

"What do you mean, bad?" Matt asked.

Lealle bit her lip. "Tense. The Guard's on the verge of fracturing. I mean, look. This Guard is young, compared to what we had when I was... well, _alive._ The old Guard had a history, a coherence that made every member feel like they were part of a single body. This Guard is too young for that. The people you've recruited still act like a bunch of separate forces who happen to share a base. I started popping into training sessions because I missed being around the Guard--you remember how often I went down for a drink with the pilots, Allura?"

Allura's mouth was dry, but she wet her lips and nodded. "I remember. You said the Guard knew how to have fun better than the politicians Father surrounded himself with."

"Exactly!" Lealle grinned, gesturing broadly again. The smile turned sad. "That's all it was, at first. A way to feel alive again, I suppose. But it turned into something more. I wanted to tell them about the old Guard, give them a little bit of that sense of belonging. They'll get there eventually, sure. Give them a few years. But there was no harm in hurrying it along a little, right?"

"So you have been talking to them?" Shiro asked.

Lealle gave him a strange look. "Of course I have. What is this, an--?" She frowned, her eyes searching out Allura. "This _is_ an interrogation, isn't it? What's happened?"

"Nothing," Allura said. "We're just trying to get a clear picture of what's happening in the Guard. You've spent time with them. That must mean they trust you. Maybe they come to you with concerns they aren't comfortable bringing to us."

It was as close as Allura could come to asking Lealle if there was any merit to Shiro's concerns, but Lealle must have sensed the gravity behind the words.

"They come to me, yes," Lealle said. "Mostly petty things. Grudges against someone who showed them up in training. Pilots' superstitions about other squads that don't suffer casualties in battle. There's no merit to any of it."

"Then why send them to us?" Shiro asked. "Why lend credence to these fears?"

"Credence?" Lealle seemed taken aback. "You don't understand, Shiro, people are already talking about these theories of theirs. They fester in one squad or another, and the more they talk about it, the more convinced they are that they have it right. If you came out tomorrow with the answer to all their questions, half of them would brush you off because, well, you just didn't look at the right people. At least if they come forward with their suspicions, at least if they know you know about them, some of their fears will be laid to rest. You'll never satisfy everyone, but you'll satisfy more people if they know you looked into the things they're already talking about."

There was a sincerity in Lealle's voice--an earnestness that tugged at Allura's heart. She glanced to Shiro, trying to gauge his reaction, but his face gave nothing away. Matt only frowned.

Lealle, too, seemed to be waiting on Shiro's declaration, her lip held between her teeth as he considered her words.

"All right," he said at length. "Thank you for talking with us. If you hear anything from the Guard you think may be important, please come talk to us."

Lealle nodded, and her hologram winked out an instant later. Allura stood, watching Shiro.

"Well?" she asked. "Are you convinced?"

Shiro avoided her gaze. "I don't think that's the sort of conversation we should be having out here where anyone might overhear."

By "anyone," of course, he meant Lealle. She, like all the AIs, was directly linked to the castle's systems, including cameras and comms. The late paladins didn't actively listen in on conversations, but they were always aware on some level, in case someone needed them.

When Allura thought of it that way, the AIs really were the perfect spy.

Still she stood, jaw clenched, and waited for Shiro to answer her question. She'd heard nothing that suggested Lealle was anything less than sincere in her desire to help. Nothing at all to suggest she was the spy, willingly or otherwise, beyond Shiro's gut feeling, which he himself had admitted had no real foundation.

The light in the room flickered, and Allura spun, expecting to see her mother standing there again. Instead, it was Rukka. Lealle's paladin armor had looked almost normal despite the blue tinge of the hologram, but the yellow accents of Rukka's were washed out and colorless, giving her a ghostly quality only intensified by her blank eyes. The holograms never had known quite what to do with Galra eyes.

"Rukka," Matt said, surprise clear in his voice. "What's wrong?"

"You were speaking with Lealle just now, weren't you?"

Shiro frowned at her, then slowly resumed his seat at the table in the center of the room. "We were. Why? Is there a problem with that?"

Rukka shook her head. Even as a hologram, she looked old. She'd _been_ old, by the time the war began, and it seemed that had carried over to her memory profile, though the holograms' ideal smoothed out the graying fur and thin patches that marked her age. "Not a problem, exactly." She hesitated. "Do you... think she has something to do with that whole spy business?"

"Do you?" Shiro asked.

"No." Rukka's feet didn't move, but she retreated a few inches just the same, her form flickering as she did so. "Lealle is like a sister to me. She would never."

The hand that had closed tight around Allura's throat loosened a fraction, and she stepped toward Rukka. "Then why did you come to speak with us?"

Rukka looked down at her, her smile not touching her eyes. "Because Zarkon was like a son to me, and I'm all too aware of what he did." She shook her head. "I don't know that it's Lealle, and I don't know that she's acting under her own power even if it is. But something isn't right. Sa won't talk to me, Keturah says I'm overreacting, but I... There are holes, Princess. Holes in my memories, and holes in my awareness. I don't remember doing anything the other day. Not anything as _me._ I can access the ship's records, so I know what was happening around the castle, but as far as I know I was dormant all day. But Keturah saw me helping with the latest batch of refugees. Some of those refugees remember talking with me, too. And--and that room out in Green Tower."

"The saferoom?" Matt asked. "It's not on the network. You wouldn't be able to see in there."

Rukka huffed, rubbing the back of the neck. "No, I know about that. But that's just the room itself. I can't see anywhere in the entire block. Not the cameras, not the sensors, not even the floor plan. And I don't know why." She dropped her hands to her side and gave Allura a pleading look. "I don't believe for a second your mother or anyone else would betray us. But I can't trust her, either. I don't even trust myself."

Shiro laid a hand on the table before her, his face sympathetic. "Thank you, Rukka. We'll look into it, and if someone is messing with the AI core, we'll put an end to it. You have my word."

Rukka smiled, nodded, and took a step back. "Thank you. I just... don't want to see anyone else get hurt."

"They won't," Matt said. "We'll make sure of it."

* * *

Sam threw himself against the machine, clawing at every foothold he could get in the programming as the robeast hounded the Green Lion. He had precious little control here; they'd guarded this thing too well against him. He was awake this time, at least, which was better than the last few times they'd sent him out. Always before, there had been... something. A dark blanket thrown across his thoughts, a glass cage keeping him trapped, only it kept shattering. Sam didn't know why, and he thought the druids didn't either. He remembered waking up in an unfamiliar lab once, but the memory was so short and so hazy he could glean very little from it. He thought they'd been trying to figure out what happened.

He thought they were looking in all the wrong places.

It tickled at the back of his mind, a puzzle he might have figured out if he'd had more time. If his youngest weren't right in front of him, fighting for their life against the monster the druids had plugged him into.

And he couldn't _do_ anything.

Sam's robeast slammed against the Green Lion, driving it backwards into one of the smaller asteroids, which stood up for only a moment under the force of two battling behemoths. It shattered, and the Green Lion twisted, slipping away and putting some distance between itself and the robeast.

Why didn't Pidge just leave? There was nothing for them here, not with the lab abandoned. Sam had recognized it from the air, and had tried to reach inside to find Rolo and Rax. How long had it been since he'd seen them last? He couldn't be sure, and that worried him. But they were gone now, the main lab abandoned. Sam hadn't had time to explore further than that, not once he felt the pull of the Watcher, the rising destructive impulse that threatened to tear apart everything in its path.

There was no doubt in his mind, though. The druids had moved, and if they had done so, that meant they'd scrubbed this place of anything useful. There was nothing for Pidge here except a fight. He wanted to tell them to leave, but he feared that distracting them in the heat of battle would only put them at greater risk. He'd given them what warning he could. All he could do now was pray.

Pray, and throw himself again and again at the wall keeping him out of the robeast's inner workings.

In his frantic clawing, he found a chink in the armor, a weak point in the druids' shield. He dug in, focusing his entire being into that exact point, and worked the gap wider, a fraction of an inch at a time. For a moment the Watcher's eye turned his way, surprised and intrigued. Not hostile; not yet. Sam couldn't tell if that was because it didn't realize what he was doing, or if it just didn’t consider him a threat.

His hold on the weak point slipped, and Sam roared in frustration as the Watcher's mind turned back to the battle. It cared little for the tiny, helpless mind trapped within it, and even less for the lives of the Green Paladins. It knew only one thing:

Destruction.

* * *

Keith watched night fall over the 301 from the small, sheltered space he'd found on the rooftop of the safehouse. There were a number of structures up here, cluttering the roof: an emergency power generator, a water tank, a storage shed, and the rooftop access itself. Considering how narrow the building was to begin with, the clutter made the rooftop almost unusable.

Except as a place to hide.

Keith wasn't even sure who he was running from. The people downstairs were the same ones he'd spent the last two days with. They were more exasperated by his constant restlessness than awed by some imagined feat of heroism, like the rest of Mirek's people seemed to be.

Why were they all so impressed by him getting blown up, anyway? Why should that make them follow him, when they hardly even knew him? Mirek had tried to explain it, and it still didn't make sense. He hadn't _done_ anything.

And yet they all looked at him like he was the next Zarkon.

Maybe literally.

Groaning, Keith buried his face in his knees and dug his claws into his hair. Lance and Akira had left, at Keith's insistence, to go out on another strike against the IP. Another day or two, and Mirek thought they'd be ready to go after Vit himself. His grip on the 301 was slipping, and enough of the other city-domes had followed the 301's lead that Vit had to be feeling the heat by now.

And here Keith was, wallowing in his own self-pity, instead of going out there to help in the fight.

The rooftop access door hissed open, sticking at a familiar point for an instant before lurching the rest of the way with a thunk. Keith tensed, shrinking deeper into his shadowed recess. He'd assumed no one else would have business on the roof, and he hoped whoever this was was coming to check on the generator or get something from storage.

The footsteps traced a circuit of the rooftop, which didn't bode well for that assessment, and Keith's heart sank as Thace came into view around the water tank. He caught sight of Keith at once, stopped, sighed, and sat on the waist-high wall surrounding the rooftop.

"I know I'm not your first choice for a heart-to-heart," Thace said without preamble. "But I think it's fair to say I know better than anyone what you're doing up here on this rooftop alone." He watched Keith for a reaction for a moment, then turned to survey the city. "Lance and Akira are worried, you know. You don't have to talk to me, but it might be a good idea to talk to someone."

"There's nothing to talk about."

The look Thace gave him was sympathetic to the point that it rankled, and Keith crossed his arms over his chest as he scooted deeper into his hiding spot. It felt ridiculous, and he knew it must have looked even worse. Was he a child again, hiding in the closet to avoid becoming a convenient target for his father’s rage?

"Keena gets people," Thace said. "For all her shortcomings, that's one thing she's always excelled at. She knows how people think, what moves them. It's why she is what she is. She knows what act to put on to get what she wants. It's how she knew that the people of the homeworld would respond to you, whether or not you set out to make them follow you."

Keith laughed, the sound sharp and biting. "Yeah, well, it looks like she got her wish."

"That's not what I'm saying. This whole plan of hers... It was never about you rallying the homeworld. She saw that as inevitable. She just wanted to control what happened next--and _that_ is something you still have control over."

Keith glanced out to where his uncle sat, staring down at the streets below. He didn't look anything like Keena. Not his posture, not his attitude. He was hard to read, but he seemed... heavy. Somber, maybe.

"What, don't you want me to be the next emperor?" The question was sharp, goading, and not at all subtle, but Keith didn’t care. He didn't think he believed it of Thace, not anymore. He and Keena weren’t very much alike--but this was something Keith had been sitting on for far too long. He needed to get it out in the open.

Thace watched him with steady eyes, a mournful slant to his ears. "I want you to be happy, Keith. If replacing Zarkon made you happy, I would support it, but I think we both know that’s not what you want."

Keith's jaw clenched, and he looked away. "So then what _do_ you think I should do?"

"I think you've had enough of people telling you what to do." Thace returned his gaze to the city, pulling one foot up onto the wall beside him and resting his arm atop it. "Follow your own heart. It hasn't let you down this far."

Keith scoffed, a lump forming in his throat. He didn’t care to examine its source. "Keena won't like that."

"She’ll get over it." A growl lurked beneath Thace's words, as though he were warning Keena off from halfway across the universe. His fangs flashed white in the light of the setting sun, and the sight somehow settled Keith's roiling gut. He was slowly getting used to seeing people protective on his behalf--Shiro and Akira, Matt, even Lance.

It was stranger, and more special, coming from Thace.

Keith lingered a few moments longer in his hiding place before standing on cramped legs and joining Thace at the edge of the roof. He left space between them and swung his feet out over the side so they dangled in open air, then wrapped his hands around the lip of the wall and stared down the ten-story drop to the street below. The vertigo of it was exhilarating and terrifying--and most importantly, it gave him something to focus on that wasn't Thace's proximity.

"What would you do?" he asked, staring down at nothing. "If you were in my place?"

Thace was quiet for a long while, his gaze a feather's touch on the side of Keith's head. Keith imagined the significance of the question hadn't passed Thace by. It was a question not born of resentment and resignation, but respect. Keith didn’t know what to do, and he found he _wanted_ Thace’s advice.

Thace weighed his words before answering, and even then spoke haltingly.

"I would fight," he said. "I would recognize the respect these people have for me, and I would respect them in turn. They are valuable allies, and their loyalty is not a bad thing. But I would make it clear that I do not intend to lead them, or to make decisions for them. I believe that is how Shiro and Princess Allura prefer to handle relations with allied worlds, is it not?"

It was, and it sounded supremely reasonable to Keith. If he were more of a diplomat, it might even have been easy. But Keith wasn't good with people, and he was afraid he was going to mess something up and end up offending someone.

"Keith." Thace rested a hand on Keith's shoulder. The touch itched, but there was something calming about it at the same time. Steadying, like when Shiro did the same. "You are not me. You are not Shiro, or Allura. You certainly are not your mother. You've always done things your own way, and look at where that's gotten you. You have _good_ instincts, Keith. Trust them."

Keith looked up at him, and was immediately overwhelmed by the intensity of Thace’s gaze--not calculating, like Keena’s; softer than that. It reminded Keith of Shiro, of Coran. Of Karen, even, when she thought Keith wasn’t watching her. It warmed Keith and intimidated him in equal measure, and he dropped his gaze before Thace could see the conflict in his eyes.

 _Trust his instincts,_ Thace had said.

Keith supposed he could give that a try.

* * *

The free Balmerans had no spoken language.

It was a strange discovery, and even now Shay didn’t know what to do with it. She had considered the possibility that there might be some differences in the song. Even among captured Balmera, there had been enough drift in the songs to make early communication a challenge. She had been dismayed, but unsurprised to encounter the same difficulties here.

Yet as the day stretched on with no signs of progress in their attempts at communication, a suspicion began to trickle in. She had yet to hear their escorts or those they were brought to--Elders, Shay could only assume--utter a single word, familiar or otherwise. They were not entirely silent; the sharp intake of breath that answered Hunk's attempt to sing a greeting, the grunt of pain as the most stooped of the Elders stepped forward to inspect them--these were proof that these Balmerans did not lack the capacity for speech, but they seemed to communicate only through the song, and they were baffled by Hunk and Shay's attempts to do otherwise.

After a short time of fruitless attempts at spoken conversation, Shay sank into the song entirely. Hunk followed as best he could, but he was not yet fluent in the songs of Shay's people, and Shay herself was barely able to make herself understood in this song.

There was so _much_ to it. Shay had picked out the emotional lines at once, as well as the ones that communicated general opinions and focus. She knew these people were shocked by the Yellow Lion's arrival, but she thought they knew what she was--and by extension, who Shay and Hunk were, in a historical context, if not a contemporary one. Certainly there was more awe and respect there than suspicion, whatever the armored guards and glittering crystalline weapons might suggest.

Deeper than these melodies, though, were subtler sounds. Subtler, but more focal, she thought. Perhaps not to her ear, but to those around her? It was as though the melodies of her own songs were mere accompaniment to the lead parts here, and it all made Shay feel like a child still learning to discern the voice of the Balmera.

Equally stunning were the surroundings. Shay had seen Balmera on the verge of death. She had seen her people subjugated, and she had seen them begin to rebuild and reclaim their home.

None of it looked anything like the free Balmera she'd landed on. There were, of course, no gaping wounds from the Galra occupation, no mine shafts with dozens of tunnels splitting off. Shay saw only a handful of natural cave openings here, and those few who approached such openings did so with reverence, the way Shay's people entered the very heart chamber. Most structures were built on the surface, shaped of stone and crystal and flanked by lush gardens of plants Shay had never seen before. Insects like iridescent versions of cave bugs crawled among these plants and flitted through the air on shimmering wings--but there were other creatures, too. Birds that glowed Quintessence blue and seemed to have crystal dust embedded in their crest feathers; luminous fish that swum in ponds and streams--more water than Shay had seen outside the old Galra cisterns on her home. There were beasts of burden, too, in fields beyond the town--the city. There were so many people here it seemed the entire population of Theros could fit just in this one city.

Everywhere she looked, Shay found something new to tear at her heart. This was how her home could have been. How Theros _should_ have been, had Zarkon not taken her and exploited her for resources. Shay thought she had known what had been taken from her, but being here, she realized she hadn't known anything at all.

They sat on a rooftop terrace, silvery blue ivy winding up the trellis that rose from each corner and arched overhead to form a sun-shade. The guards waited by the stairs on either side of the terrace, and servers brought chilled drinks more tart than anything Shay had tasted on a Balmera before. She drank to be polite, but found the liquid soured on her tongue.

She had spent several minutes looking out over the city while the Elders conferred in the deep tones, her heart breaking and soaring in turn. In her wildest dreams, she had not imagined finding free Balmera to feel quite like this.

She had not imagined herself feeling so much like an intruder.

Shaking herself from her melancholy, Shay ventured back into the song, doing her best to twist those melodies familiar to her into more specific meanings. She focused first on a gentle apology as she broke into the Elder's conversation, and then once they had given her their attention, she faltered. She wanted to ask what they knew of Voltron, what they knew of Zarkon's Empire and the war ravaging the universe. She wanted to know if they'd seen the Vkullor.

Yet how did one ask any of that without words? Frustration rose up to close Shay's throat, but she forced it from her song and began to prod, singing of sorrow, of loss, of violence. These resonated with the listening Balmerans, but when Shay sang of the captivity into which she had been born, she was answered with silence and confusion. So, too, when she tried to compress her horror at witnessing the aftermath of the Vkullor attack, it sparked something in these Balmerans' song, but whatever answer they gave washed over Shay as though it were empty of meaning.

"Are you following any of this?" Hunk asked, leaning over to whisper in her ear. "Because I'm definitely not."

Shay sang a single, mournful note. "Very little, I am afraid. I do not know this song well enough to speak of specifics."

Hunk grimaced, and Shay hummed to him, soothing his nerves and seeking solace in return.

It was a moment before she realized the Elders had gone silent. Startled, she cut off, and one of the Elders leaned forward, setting aside her drink at the same time as she reached out for Shay. She began to sing, haltingly, the same melody Shay had just been humming to Hunk. It was, Shay realized abruptly, the song of the Yellow Lion--distorted and unpracticed, to be sure, but too familiar to be mistaken. She hadn’t realized that it had become her song of comfort--and she certainly had not imagined these Balmerans would recognize it. It was not a song she had heard on a Balmera before.

Shay made a questioning sound, the curiosity of it echoing in her song, and the Elder shot a desperate look at her fellows.

"What's-- Is that Yellow's song?" Hunk asked. "How do they know that?"

"I..." Shay shook her head, falling silent again, as the Elder who had mimicked Yellow's song sang again, imploring. Shay frowned, but nodded. "I think they are asking us to be patient," she told Hunk. "I think... perhaps they have had an idea about how to communicate?"

"It's better than what we've got now," Hunk said, standing as one of the other Elders gestured for them to do so. A Balmeran dressed in the same uniform as the one who had served the drinks led them from the terrace to a small sitting room--more luxuriously furnished than anything on Theros, to be sure, yet in a style that felt unlike anything else Shay had seen in the universe. The furniture was solid and polished to a shine, the walls studded with small crystals rather than lit by torches or lamps. The chairs in the room were low and contoured--similar in shape to what Shay was used to, but more ornate and with thin cushions atop them. Everything was a work in contrast--bright blues and greens and yellows against brown, black, and gray; sharp angles and hard lines except for a smattering of spirals in the embellishments around the room.

A second staff member brought a tray of fruits and seeds, along with two pitchers--one of clear, cold water, the other of the same tart juice they had had on the roof. They sang something Shay assumed was a farewell, or perhaps a reminder to call if they had need of anything.

Then they were gone, leaving Hunk and Shay alone in the room.

* * *

There was an itch beneath Karen's skin, a fire behind her sternum. Her breath came short, like she'd run all the way to the bridge, though she'd been sitting here for close to an hour.

"Are you all right?" Shiro asked, startling her out of her reverie.

She jumped, her eyes abruptly refocusing on the screen in front of her. She'd been in the middle of cross-referencing her list of suspects with Olkari connections, but she had no idea where she'd left off; her mind had been somewhere else for a while now.

Shaking her head, Karen pushed her seat back from the terminal she'd been working at. "Sorry," she said to Shiro. "I'm fine, just..."

"Just...?"

She pursed her lips, trying to chase down the source of the tightness in her chest. "Pidge... And Ryner. When was the last time we heard from them?"

Alarm flickered across Shiro's face, and Karen had to admit it wasn't without reason. She herself was numb to the panic, maybe because the anxiety came with the assurance that both green paladins were still alive and in one piece.

Shiro disappeared from her field of view for a moment, and Karen's chest twinged again. It had been building for... for how long, now? It had gotten lost in her stress over the spy, at first, but as it built, it was impossible to mistake. Something was wrong. Pidge and Ryner were in danger--maybe not in active danger, right at this moment, but danger was hounding them.

"Eight hours," Shiro called. Coran looked up from the forward station, where he was looking into something with Allura. Karen had only caught part of that conversation, but she gathered it was something to do with the security network, which was why they hadn't been able to look into it from the secure conference room. Shiro looked up at Karen, his expression carefully controlled. "Last check-in was when they started their search for today. Did they find something?"

Karen opened her mouth, but for once, nothing came to her. "I... I'm not sure." She probed the bond for details, waiting for Green to supply her with information as she always did. Whenever she thought about something to do with Pidge, she always just knew. Had Pidge found something? Were they on their way back, or had they gotten trapped somewhere? Were they even still in the Jessaranti Asteroid Belt, or had what they'd found there taken them somewhere else?

Karen didn't know, and that terrified her.

She stared at Shiro for a long moment, her mouth hanging open, her heart pounding--this time from her own fear, and not what she sensed through the adjunct bond.

"I need to call them."

* * *

Val shot a glance at Nyma as she flew them into the open wormhole. A million questions buzzed around in her head, but she kept a lid on them all. Nyma had kept silent all through breakfast this morning before announcing suddenly as she dumped her dirty dishes into the sanitizer that they had a mission.

Val hadn't seen anything in their inbox. Hadn't heard anything from Coran or Shiro or Allura, either. Judging from Nyma's jitters--amplified tenfold once they were inside Blue's cockpit--this was something personal. More than that. Nyma's thoughts floated on the surface of the bond, and Val knew it would only take one look to see the whole of it.

She stayed out of it as much as she could. Nyma hadn't volunteered any information, and Val wanted to respect that. Nyma would tell her when she was ready. Hopefully, that would be before they were in the thick of it.

They emerged from the wormhole to an unfamiliar planet banded shades of blue and gray. Val's first glance showed signs of a recent battle--the wreckage of an Imperial warship drifting out beyond the planet's moons, dark and pockmarked. Several Guard ships hovered near it, poking through the wreckage, with another complement in lower orbit.

Val glanced at Nyma, trying to figure out when it was appropriate to press for details. Fortunately, Nyma picked up on her unasked questions before it came to that.

Nyma sighed. "Don't worry," she said. "This should be quick. The Guard's been picking apart the occupying force for a week. Last real holdouts are in one of the major cities. We just need to help them clear out the last big prison, and then we'll be golden."

There was more lurking just below the surface of Nyma's words, a tangle of emotion Val was reluctant to claw at. They weren't here because the Guard needed help; the hard work was already done.

They were here because something here mattered to Nyma.

That was enough of an explanation for now, so Val did a cursory sweep of the area as Nyma brought them in. She felt as though a spring in her chest had unwound. Nyma, it seemed, had been expecting her to pry. Val smiled, reaching over without looking to squeeze Nyma's hand.

* * *

Keith didn't draw any less attention the next time he returned to headquarters. The weight of a dozen pairs of eyes still prickled at the back of his neck, and he tried, at first, to hide behind Akira.

 _Trust your instincts,_ Thace had said. Good advice, except that Keith's instincts were pulling him in two different directions. They told him to run away from his mother's plans, whatever form they took.

And they told him that he needed to be here, in this place. The Galra people needed his help as much as anyone, if not more.

He caught sight of Mirek across the room, and his heart began to pound at once. He would not be what Keena wanted of him. He refused.

But he would be whatever these people needed him to be. If that meant he had to be an icon, a symbol of the resistance--he would be that for these people. But only for as long as they needed him. Only as long as it took to drive the Empire out.

"Mirek," he called, squaring his shoulders as he struck out across the room to where she stood conferring with some of the techs. She looked up at the sound of her name and seemed to recognize the seriousness in Keith's face.

"Verify those reports and get back to me," she said to the techs, then crossed to meet Keith in the middle of the room. "Keith. You're looking... steadier."

He smiled to himself, straining not to let his ears quiver with a hysterical sort of amusement. _Steadier._ If only she knew. "Thanks? The medic cleared me for fieldwork, too," he said, ignoring Lance's muttered commentary from behind. Lance thought the medic had only cleared Keith to get him to stop pestering him. And... okay, Keith had been... persistent. But Thace had already given the all-clear, and Thace knew Keith's limits better than some random local doctor, anyway.

Besides, it wasn't like either Lance or Akira were going to let Keith out of their sight for the next week. If they ran into any trouble, Keith would no doubt end up having to drag _them_ to safety, after they flung themselves in the path of every slight threat to turn Keith's way.

He did feel a little bit guilty about that, but mostly he was exasperated. They couldn't sit around forever waiting for Vit to get bored and go home.

Mirek grinned, something vicious in her smile. "Excellent. We could use you."

"Where are we at?" Lance said. "The IP still MIA?"

Keith shot a look at Lance. He had mentioned something about the Imperial Police cracking under the pressure. They'd always been an unusually well-funded gang of bullies, used to flashing a badge and having everyone listen to them under threat of fines or jail time. Now that people were actually fighting back, a good number of them had decided the job wasn't worth the risk.

Mirek nodded. "I don't think as many of them have deserted as it seems. More likely, they're conveniently not getting Vit's memos so they don't have to wade into the muck. After we kick Vit off the planet, we'll have to figure out how to dismantle the IP and replace them with a functional police force. For now, though, Vit seems to be using his own troops for everything."

"That's good, isn't it?" Akira asked. "Means we have a lot fewer people to worry about."

Lance shook his head. "That still leaves the ships in orbit. We haven't seen troops from them yet, have we?"

"We haven't," Mirek said. "Rumor says Vit's been requesting backup from them, but they've all denied his requests."

"Politics." Keith rolled his eyes, shooting a look at a display showing a slightly grainy image of the ships in orbit. Vit's ship was easy to pick out from the other three; it was smaller, less ornate. It had probably brought several thousand troops to the homeworld, split between ground and aerial forces, but if other cities were headed the same way as the 301, with the IP pulling out of the fight, then Vit's forces would be stretched incredibly thin.

Seeing that the others were all staring at him, Keith furrowed his brow and waved a hand at the screen.

"His 'backup'? Those other ships? They belong to Princes or other highly ranked officers. Vit's, what? A Lieutenant? He was sent here either as a test or because someone thought it would be an easy job. Those other ships were sent in to try to salvage things, but they're not going to do anything that might let Vit take credit for the victory."

Lance scrunched up his nose. "So we're safe for now, but as soon as we kick Vit to the curb, we're going to have an even stronger force jumping down our throats?"

"We'll have to pit the princes against each other somehow." Mirek's claws dug furrows in her hair, the glow of her cybernetic eye dimming as she got lost in the problem.

Keith waited for a three-count before he said, " _Or._ We take them all out at once." The others stared at him, and he felt his uncertainty returning at the panic that flashed in Lance's eyes. He seemed to have already seen where Keith was headed, and he didn't seem to like it.

To be fair, Keith was pretty sure Matt and Akira were the only other people who would call it a good idea. He wasn't sure how much of this plan was that he was tired of sitting on the sidelines, and how much was that he thought it might actually work. It wasn't something Keena would condone in a thousand years, that was for sure.

But his gut told him it was their best shot, and seeing as he didn't know what else to do about accidentally making himself a hero of the everyman, he didn't have anything left to him _but_ his gut.

"Think about it," he said. "The princes aren't doing anything right now. Deliberately. They think they're safe, so they're kicking back until Vit crashes and burns. If we wait until we're through with Vit, the rest of the fleet will be ready to step up and finish securing the homeworld. They'll have the advantage. Plus, Vit's going to take as many of us with him as he can because giving up isn't an option with all those eyes on him. If he sees us crush the fleet out there, it might hit him hard enough that we can clean up without much collateral damage. It might at least scare some of his troops into surrendering, with or without Vit's okay."

"You think they even know what's going on with the higher-ups?" Akira asked. "Or has Vit kept quiet about them not getting reinforcements? 'Cause the troops might be banking on getting help if they can just hold out another couple of days."

Keith locked eyes with Akira and smiled, the butterflies in his stomach quieting at last as Lance and Mirek fell silent.

At length, Lance blew out a breath. "Well, shit."

"How?" Mirek's voice was cautious, her eyes sharp as she pinned Keith with her question. "We don't have access to battle-ready ships, and if we hit one of Vit's airfields, that's going to tip off the fleet to what we're planning."

Keith crossed his arms, running his claw across a seam in his jacket sleeve. "We don't need to hit the airfields. We've got the Red Lion. She's fast, she's gone up against Imperial warships before, and if I can make it past the fleet, I should be able to contact the castle, right? Worst case scenario here, we bring in Voltron."

He held his breath as Mirek considered that, but he already knew what her answer was going to be. They didn't have many options here, and the fleet waiting in orbit was too big a threat to be ignored.

After a long moment, she shook her head. "It's dramatic, I'll give it that. And dramatic may be just what we need right now." She glanced at Lance, who still looked nervous. "All right. We'll want to move quickly, before Vit has a chance to notice that you're up and about again. I'll call the other coordinators together for a strategy meeting. We move tonight."

* * *

Shiro tried three times to contact the Green Lion. On top of Karen's repeated attempts, it was probably excessive, especially after Pidge had responded with a curt message. _No danger. Following lead. Will be in touch._

From anyone else, the message may have been cause for alarm, but it wasn't entirely out of character for Pidge to be short when they were focused on something--doubly so when that something was the search for their father. Karen admitted, grudgingly, that Pidge's message seemed to be the truth--or at least, there was nothing in what she sensed in the bond that contradicted Pidge's message.

"I suppose they might be infiltrating another base," Karen said. "Dangerous, but not immediately so."

"You don't know?" The idea was preposterous. Knowledge was exactly what Green had promised Karen when taking her as an adjunct. For Karen to _not know_ something relating to Pidge and Ryner was deeply unsettling.

Karen smiled back at him, the expression wan. "I suppose we'll just have to wait for them to get in touch."

The whole encounter left Shiro feeling out of sorts, and he headed back to the bridge to see what the others had dragged up on the AIs and the odd hole in their perception in the block around the secure conference room. Allura and Coran were huddled together over the main terminal when he arrived, Matt pacing. He lifted his eyes from his tablet when Shiro walked in.

"Any word?"

Shiro shook his head. "Pidge said they're following a lead, but that's about as much as we're getting for now. They are safe, though."

"As safe as a paladin ever is," Matt muttered.

Shiro put an arm around him and shifted his glance to Allura and Coran. "What about you guys? I hope you have better news than me."

"There are... anomalies in the old paladins' memory profiles," Allura said, her voice neutral. "All of them. It's nothing that hasn't happened before. Minor fluctuations in Quintessence in their cores, bits of corrupt data here and there."

"The same thing has been happening almost as long as they've been active," Coran said. "It's probably down to the way they were created. We were all in such a rush towards the end, and only Rukka and Sa had a chance to try to round out their profiles at all. I'm not sure we can take a little bit of inconsistency to mean they've been tampered with."

"And that would explain the holes in Rukka's memories?" Shiro asked.

Coran hesitated. "It might. Part of the process of creating a memory profile is teaching the AI how to process and store new memories. If there wasn't enough for the computers to draw on, there could be places that things slip through..."

He didn't sound convinced, and Shiro wondered how much of this was him trying to reassure himself. "Okay. So what do you recommend doing? I know we'd talked about restricting the AIs."

Matt and Coran both glanced at Allura, who had been the main voice of opposition to the plan when Coran had first proposed it. She was hurt by the insinuation that she couldn't trust her mother. Shiro understood that, but the simple fact was that Shiro _didn't_ think they could trust any of the AIs. Not as it stood now. Maybe the questions would turn out to have innocent answers; he certainly hoped so, for all their sake.

But he couldn't justify taking risks.

Allura's shoulders slumped after a moment, and she shook her head. "We already restricted them. They have no access to the castle's systems, and no ability to manifest or interact with anyone or anything unless we go down to the memory cores ourselves. I suppose for the time being, we ought to stay the course. We can always reinstate their access if the situation changes in the future."

Shiro squeezed Allura's shoulder. "I'm sure we'll get this all straightened out soon. What about the oddities in the conference room's block? Have we looked into that yet?"

"I started a scan earlier," Coran said. "Should be done by now..." He trailed off as he searched for the scan results, and Shiro rubbed Allura's back. She was still tense, though she melted a little under Shiro's massage.

Coran hummed to himself as he skimmed through the results of the diagnostics. "Everything seems to be in working order... Nothing in the permissions that should be keeping them out. Could be another facet of their spotty memory. They have difficulty processing new situations. Perhaps they have difficulty processing new configurations of the castle, as well."

"Have we reconfigured anything else?" Shiro asked. “They should have similar difficulties with those areas if your theory is right.”

"I don't think we have," Allura said, restless energy bursting from her as she called up her own screen to load a different report. "Reconfiguration is a considerable drain on castle resources, and after ten thousand years, there were other priorities. I don't see why we would have..."

She trailed off, her hands stilling on the screen. Shiro craned his neck to see what had caught her attention. He saw a list of codes in Altean characters--ID codes, or something similar, as Pidge's translator didn't touch them. Beside them were numbers Shiro recognized as Altean dates, though he was rusty on his calendar conversions. These could have been renovations from ten thousand years ago, for all he knew.

"Coran?" Allura asked. "When did you finish with the conference room?"

"Hmm? Oh, a week after you left to find the Pygnarat master, give or take."

"And we haven't modified anything since then?"

Coran caught the tone of her voice, and rather than answer, he silently crossed to her side and squinted at the screen.

"Quiznak," he whispered. "That’s less than two weeks ago!"

Matt put a hand on Shiro's shoulder, steadying himself as he went up on his toes, trying to peer over the press of shoulders to see the screen. "What was? Did someone mess with the conference room?"

Allura tapped on the last line in the log, her voice dropping to a growl. "If not the room itself, then something on the same floor. I'm pulling up the schematic now."

They waited for a breathless moment as the schematic loaded, flashing orange at the location of reconfiguration: not the secure conference room, but an unused storage room that shared a wall with it. Shiro frowned, and Allura made a surprised noise, but behind Shiro Matt tensed, and Coran actually cursed under his breath.

"What?" Shiro asked. "Is that bad?"

"Almost certainly," Coran said. "I'll have to go do a physical inspection of the room, but we built a tech-neutral buffer around that room. A form of redundancy, you see. We have security built into the room itself, but we didn't want anyone getting close enough to tamper. See how there's this inaccessible space on the other sides of the room?"

"You mean our secure conference room isn't as secure as we thought."

"We certainly need to proceed under the assumption that that's the case, until we resolve the issue or prove otherwise."

Shiro grimaced, but Allura straightened her spine and jabbed her finger at the screen. "Who did this? No one should have the authority to override that configuration. No one except--"

She broke off, and Shiro hurried to read the dialogue that had popped up. It was, as always, difficult to make the translator kick in, but once it did, he skimmed the details. Date and time of request, content of request, date and time of completion... And there at the bottom, the name of the user who had input the request.

Matthew Holt.

* * *

The _Eryth_ was as silent as the grave.

A peculiar saying, that. Meri had found the expression chilling the first time she heard it, perhaps because it called to mind the tradition of spacefaring Alteans--returning the corpse of a deceased loved one to the universe's embrace by ejecting them into the vacuum of space.

Well, that felt about right for tonight. It was silent, and still, and as she crept down to the archives room, Meri felt as though she couldn't get enough air into her lungs.

She was really doing this.

It was deceptively easy to get into Haggar's account. Easy enough that she worried she'd missed something and Haggar was on her way even now to kill her. Easy enough that she wondered why she hadn't done this three weeks ago.

Why _hadn’t_ she done it sooner? She was sure there had been reasons--valid reasons, solid reasons--but she couldn’t call them to mind just now. She’d gotten so used to the fog that came with Quintessence injections that she hardly thought about it anymore, but she was sure that was what this was. She wasn’t thinking straight. She hadn’t been for some time, she thought.

She was going to have to cover her tracks.

It was the kind of revelation she’d had a dozen times, but it kept slipping from her mind. She had enough to do just getting the information and getting out. To erase her presence here on top of that?

She wasn't sure she was up to it. She'd messed with a few prisoners' heads, picked apart Haggar’s technique when she did the same. But she was under no illusion that anything she'd done up to this point was comparable to going toe-to-toe with Haggar. She wouldn't be able to surgically remove memories of her tenure on the _Eryth_ or quietly redirect Haggar's thoughts away from Vindication to keep her from realizing there was a new staff member on the payroll. Planting a false memory of Haggar herself reassigning Ulaz was even farther from Meri's reach.

It was going to be a sloppy job, and she knew it. She'd do her best to scramble Haggar's head, drop a few more obvious motives for her infiltration and betrayal. Hell, maybe she could find something in Haggar's files that would point to the identity of the spy on the castle-ship. If Haggar thought she was only taking information, and not making changes, it might buy Ulaz a little more time.

She'd still have to be level with him about the risks, of course. It might turn out to not be worth it in the end. She hoped Pidge had been able to make good on the lead about the Jessaranti lab. With luck, they wouldn't _need_ Ulaz to go undercover.

Might force his retirement either way, though.

Well, she could iron out those details when she was out of here. For now, she had free reign of probably everything there was to find in Imperial servers, and she was damn well going to make the best of it.

She started with Vindication, her neck itching with the sensation that she was going to be walked in on at any moment. If Haggar caught her, she wanted to at least have something on Sam Holt. Something to make this entire endeavor mean something.

There were a staggering number of files on Vindication--far more than she could hope to sift through in one night. She wondered if Haggar would know if she made a copy, if she should risk tipping her hand. Though, again, she reminded herself that it didn't matter if Haggar knew what they knew. As long as _all_ she saw was that Meri had stolen information...

But if she knew Meri had been interested in the project at all, she might very well turn her attention that way to patch up holes in security--and to scrutinize the new hire.

Meri hesitated for a long time. Too long, she was sure, but she didn't want to do anything too hastily and regret it later. Her head pounded in time with her pulse and brought her no closer to a decision. She wasn’t sure there _was_ a right choice here. Either way might get someone killed. So she plugged in her memory chip and started the transfer.

A risk.

Hopefully the right one.

While the transfer proceeded, she went looking for the personnel records, only to stop with a blank message to someone named Decora--the head druid on the project, as far as Meri could tell--pulled up on screen. She stared at it, the molasses flow of her thoughts finally picking up speed.

She was so _stupid._ All this time sneaking around, trying to learn mind magic to cover her tracks... All this stressing about Haggar seeing what she’d done.

Why _do_ anything, right now?

They didn't need Ulaz's cover to hold up long, now that they had all this information. They didn't need it to stand up to outside scrutiny at all. All Pidge had to do was spoof Haggar's origin code and send the transfer order at their leisure. They could send Ulaz in and stage a breakout the next day, and Haggar would never see it coming.

Meri hastily closed out of the messaging system, her hands shaking as laughter bubbled up on uneven breaths. Weeks of planning, weeks of watching and waiting. She’d spent so much time thinking about this--so how had she never _once_ considered letting Pidge do the computer work?

Well, she was in here now. As long as she had a few minutes, she should see what else she could find. She navigated through the files more or less at random, reluctant to try to run a search for anything in particular. Especially on the spy front, she doubted it would be so easily found, anyway.

A cursory scan of the directory turned up nothing obvious, though that probably should have been what Meri expected. If Haggar had anything on the spy here at all, it wasn't like it would be labeled SPY STUFF in big neon letters. Meri could try to copy over the entire archive, which would take hours, or she could give it up and try to find something else useful.

It was while she was weighing her options that she found something entirely different.

> Operation Seigurd

The title pulled at her, winding tight around her chest. _Seigurd_ \--an Altean loanword. It had become part of the Galran lexicon long before the war, but it still rankled to see it here in Haggar’s files. The fact that the word referred to cleaning up an old mess only made her more uncomfortable still.

Even as the file transfer finished, Meri opened the file titled Operation Seigurd, and her heart immediately dropped into her stomach.

"Oh, no," she whispered, her eyes flying across the screen. There was a lot here, too much to process at a glance, but two things were immediately clear:

Operation Seigurd was an invasion on a massive scale.

And its target was New Altea.

Meri cursed, scrolling and scanning for any indication of when the attack was scheduled to begin, or where the troops were massing. The Battle for Earth had nearly been a disaster, and Voltron had only had to contend with Zarkon's flagship, his prototype Lion, and a single robeast. This one...

She had scarcely begun her search when Quintessence crackled along her spine. The breath stilled in her lungs, ice closing around her throat. She sat frozen for an interminable minute before Haggar’s hand came to rest on her shoulder.

"Hello, Meri. I think it's time we had a little... _chat_.”

* * *

Ten minutes into the fight, Pidge switched their brain off. It didn't matter where they were, or what they'd found--what they suspected they'd found. It didn't matter that clues to their father's fate waited just out of reach, or that there was someone inside Dark Green, someone who didn't deserve to die just because Haggar had turned them into a monster.

What mattered was survival.

What mattered was putting an end to this fight.

They’d tried, at first, to scare off Dark Green, or to ground it long enough to get back into the lab for answers.

After that, they’d tried to run. Dark Green was too tough to take down easily, and it showed no signs of giving up the chase. They would have to kill it to get past it, and Pidge wasn’t ready to do that. Whoever the pilot was, whether their mind was their own or not, they didn’t deserve to die just because they were in Pidge’s way.

But Dark Green was vicious, dogging Pidge's every maneuver and cutting them off when they tried to take off for a stretch of open space where they might be able to gain some ground. As near as Pidge could tell, Green was marginally faster than Haggar's copy in a straightaway, though Dark Green had better boosters to match its improved lasers and armor. It could dart around the battlefield and tank hits like no other, but it lacked Green's finesse.

That was what Pidge tried to tell themself, anyway. The cockpit shuddered as Green plowed through another asteroid, courtesy of a point blank laser blast from Dark Green.

Pidge steadied them, and with Ryner's help, Green sprouted a pair of new cannons, designed to exploit a weakness Ryner had identified in Dark Green's shields. Pidge had been too busy flying to consciously partake in the analysis or design, but they'd followed the shape of Ryner's thoughts well enough to be cautiously optimistic.

Twin balls of crackling blue-green energy impacted Dark Green's chest, tendrils of light snaking across its body as quick as lightning but in a pattern that reminded Pidge of growing ivy. Dark Green twitched once, then went utterly still, the magenta glow of its eyes dimming. Pidge held their breath, already weighing their options for escape. They didn't expect Dark Green to be out for long, and they needed time to open a wormhole, get through, and close it before their opponent caught up.

Dark Green recovered faster than Pidge anticipated, firing its boosters and body-slamming the Green Lion just as she began to turn away. Pidge cried out in alarm as they were tossed, the stars spinning around them until they couldn't tell which way they were facing.

"Damn," Ryner muttered, bracing herself against the console. "I thought that would work."

"It almost did." Pidge wrestled with the controls, straightening Green out and turning to face Dark Green before it could take advantage of the opening. Rather than engage, though, they simply took off, shooting past Dark Green into a thicker cluster of asteroids that absorbed lasers from behind. The asteroids of Jessaranti had seemed so spread out when they were conducting their search, but now, flying at top speed, Pidge felt like they were in a slalom, constantly nudging the controls. If they lost focus for an instant, they were sure they would crash straight into one of these rocks, losing their speed and whatever lead they may have gained on Dark Green.

Ryner's frustration simmered just below the surface, and Pidge reached out to better see the problem, letting Ryner direct their body for a moment. The problem was they couldn't get a good read on Dark Green's specs. Their scanners supplied some information, but too much of what Ryner was using in her designs was guesswork, or lifted from the designs of other robeasts they'd encountered.

Obviously, Haggar had improved in creating the lions. She'd filled in gaps in their defenses, redesigned the shields just enough that Ryner couldn't circumvent them altogether.

"I need more time," Ryner growled. "If I could analyze these readings, cross-reference them with the robeasts we’ve encountered before, I might be able to come up with something. A tweak in the frequency of the Quintessence, or in the composition of the missiles..."

She shook her head, retreating into herself as Pidge took control once more. They bit their lip, but Ryner was right. Too much of their brainpower had to go toward escape; they couldn't take the time they needed to come up with a clever solution to their problem.

But as long as they couldn't take Dark Green down, it would just keep coming, a stalemate that would continue until one of them got the better of the other--and the way this battle had gone so far, it wouldn’t be Green who came out on top.

A window popped up between Pidge and Ryner on the viewscreen, blank cerulean with a cursor flashing on the first line. An instant later, text began to appear, scrolling by too fast to process. Pidge stared at it for a long moment, picking out familiar formulas and mechanical specifications that almost seemed...

Dark Green took advantage of Pidge's distraction to close the distance between them, unloading with the LOKI and momentarily whiting out the viewscreen. Pidge screwed their eyes shut, looking through Green's eyes to track Dark Green's movements and dodge its follow-up attacks. They danced, chasing each other around an asteroid until Dark Green shattered it with a single blast. Shards of stone peppered Green's shields, and Pidge took off at random, searching for more cover.

All the while, the text continued to scroll, and Ryner read through it, her mind going quiet as she drank it all in.

 _Is this you?_ Pidge thought in Green's direction, but even before they'd finished asking, they knew the answer was no. They smelled salt on the air, like a breeze off the ocean, tasted copper on their tongue.

A familiar presence raised the hairs along the back of their neck.

Breath faltering, Pidge exchanged looks with Ryner.

Dark Green's pilot.

Did they trust this? If the pilot was a friend, as they'd claimed, they were better equipped than almost anyone else in the universe to fill in the gaps in Pidge and Ryner's knowledge of Dark Green. With the information even now pouring into Green's systems, they could take Haggar's creation apart piece by blood-stained piece.

Or it could be a trick, and whatever it was the pilot was trying to tell Ryner to build would get them all killed.

And still something tickled the back of Pidge's mind. Something familiar in the presence, or in the data they had uploaded into Green's systems. A trick? Maybe. But the lump in Pidge's throat was undeniably real, and they didn't have time to examine the feeling of mingled dread and relief.

"Do it," they said. "Whatever the pilot is telling us, we need to listen."

Ryner's head swiveled. "Pidge--"

She made it no further than that. Maybe she saw into Pidge's head and understood their irrational instinct to trust. Maybe she just saw that they had very few other choices, especially so long as Dark Green continued to block their escape. They'd help up well so far, but they couldn't keep going like this indefinitely.

With a soft curse, Ryner got to work. Pidge tracked her progress with one corner of their mind, focusing the rest on dodging Dark Green's shots, on putting as many asteroids between them as possible, on moving, always. If they stopped, they were dead, so they didn't stop for even a second.

They didn't know how long it took. Not long, probably. Ryner was quick at synthesizing her designs, and Green always picked them up in a flash. Olkari tech. It was just about as close to a genuine technological miracle as Pidge had ever seen, and it meshed beautifully with the lions themselves.

The presence lingered in the cockpit for the first few minutes. Pidge could feel them there, hovering. Watchful. Anxious, though Pidge wasn't quite willing to hazard a guess as to the source of that particular emotion. Maybe the pilot was worried about Pidge and Ryner. Maybe they were worried their plan would fail.

Maybe they were worried someone would catch onto the trap they'd laid and were anxious about being discovered. Pidge didn't think that was it, but they'd been wrong before. Not often, but often enough to be cynical even of their own conclusions.

Before they knew it, Ryner was done, and Pidge took a deep breath as Green integrated the new weapon into her arsenal. It was a little clunkier than Ryner's usual designs--but clunky in the way many of Pidge's designs were. They were still getting used to the idea of organic machines, and their work lacked a certain elegance that was evident in Ryner's work.

Well, at least they could be sure the pilot wasn't an Olkari engineer.

"Ready?" Pidge asked.

Ryner sank her arms into the control sockets up to the elbows, her unease crackling across the surface of the bond. "As I'll ever be."

Pidge nodded, counting to three before they wheeling Green around. Ryner unloaded in the same instant, and Dark Green didn't have time to respond. Twin blasts from the two new cannons spiraled around each other, closing the distance to Dark Green in a fraction of a second. It took the brunt of the blast in the chest, and the same ivy-lightning effect as before crawled across the surface of its armor--more vibrantly green this time, though still cooler than the lime green accents Haggar had painted on.

Pidge followed up with a physical attack, slamming into Dark Green while it was still locked up. It didn't make a single move to defend itself, and the force of the collision sent it crashing down onto one of the larger asteroids.

Dark Green hit hard, bouncing as it impacted the surface. It skidded backward across the stone, digging pale grooves into the asteroid's surface. Green energy still sparked at its joints as it tried, feebly, to move. Then it collapsed, utterly limp. Nearly dead, except that the crimson and magenta lights still glowed at its eyes and the seams of its armor.

"Finish it," Ryner said, firmly, though not without sympathy. "We can’t leave a weapon like this in Haggar’s hands."

Pidge hesitated. They knew Ryner was right, _should_ have been right, but an insistent voice in the back of their head kept telling them that they were missing something. Something vital.

They knew they should have destroyed Dark Green; they knew they might not get another chance like this one.

But they couldn’t make their fingers squeeze the triggers.

A moment passed, both lions motionless, Pidge shaking as Ryner’s alarm grew. Dark Green's mouth opened, the ramp meeting the ground askew because of the angle of the lion's head. A figure appeared at the top of the ramp, tall and thin and dressed in a sick imitation of the paladin armor. It was all black, with crimson accent lights instead of aquamarine and an Imperial sigil painted on their chest in that same sickly shade of lime green. A pair of yellow eyes burned within the shadowed helmet.

Pidge's heart stopped beating. The silhouette of the pilot, even obscured by the armor--his posture, his gait. It was all wrong. Horribly, sickeningly wrong, but there was no mistaking it. Pidge would have recognized him anywhere. They knew even before the figure lifted his head to look directly into Pidge's eyes. Before Green zoomed in on his face, displaying it larger-than-life on the screen directly before Pidge's seat.

They couldn't seem to draw in enough air, and their hands shook on the controls as they stared back into eyes they hadn't seen in nearly two years.

" _Dad_."

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr [@squirenonny](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com) with questions, comments, headcanons, art, or anything else you'd like to share! My askbox is open--or @-tag me or tag the post 'voltron duality' or 'dualityverse' if you'd like me to see it!
> 
> We also now have a discord server! [Come join the Duality family!](https://discord.gg/ySKdjsW)


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